


The Price of Vengeance I

by Encairion



Series: The Price of Eternity [3]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/F, F/M, Fingon is Gil-galad and Guilin of Nargothrond's baby daddy, Finrod is Gildor's baby daddy, Good Parent Fingolfin, Good Parent Fëanor, M/M, Maglor is Glorfindel's baby daddy, Multi, Not pro-Valar, but it's the Silm so who's surprised?, lots of heartache
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:28:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 86
Words: 516,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28867023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Encairion/pseuds/Encairion
Summary: Better to remember them in their summer when they possessed the tender hearts of children who loved so easily.  Better to remember them in their autumn when they burned bright and laughed their defiance in winter's face, too full of fire to feel its coming bite.  Better to remember them when the light in their eyes had been the ardor of their hearts, not the fever-light of a despair so deep it birthed monsters.But the deeper the darkness, the brighter the dawn.
Relationships: (one sided), Aredhel & Maeglin | Lómion, Celegorm | Turcafinwë/Maeglin | Lómion, Curufin | Curufinwë/Finrod Felagund | Findaráto, Eöl & Maeglin | Lómion, Eöl/Míriel/Finwë/OFC, Eöl/OMC, Finduilas Faelivrin/Gwindor, Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë & Fingon | Findekáno, Fingon | Findekáno/Glorfindel, Fingon | Findekáno/Maedhros | Maitimo, Fëanor | Curufinwë & Sons of Fëanor, Fëanor | Curufinwë/Fingolfin | Ñolofinwë
Series: The Price of Eternity [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2121342
Comments: 102
Kudos: 70





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Please heed the warnings listed for this story. The major warning include: rape, rape of an underage character, suicide, graphic character death, depictions of torture, and incest. 
> 
> I started writing this story over a decade ago, but posted it on another site. I’m transferring it over here, but the other site is currently down so I can’t add a link to the completed work.

The Price of Vengeance 

Chapter 1

Years of the Trees, Taniquetil, Valinor

Laurelin’s light cast golden shadows over Maglor’s skin, reforging his face into a jewel set within a fall of black, black hair. Irimë traced the aristocratic bones and the bow of his lips with her fingertips, and ignored the way his hands tightened to fists in the sheets. It was just guilt eating away at him, souring their love. 

Jaw clenched, Maglor opened his eyes and looked at her. Once she would have found tenderness in his star-grey eyes, now they regarded her warily, as if she caressed his skin with a bared blade. More and more pieces of him stopped climbing into bed with her when his body did. But he would never stop coming back to her. She would not allow it.

She cupped his jaw, feeling the heat of his skin and the curve of his bones in her palm. “When will you return to me?” 

He must be off, back to Tirion. Laurelin’s light waned, the Mingling fast approaching. The journey down the mountain would not wait. She doubted he’d make it back to the palace before night fell, but as long as he’d left the villa before her husband returned, their affair would remain secret. 

“When I can.” He slipped off the bed and began searching the floor for his discarded clothes. 

That wasn’t good enough. If she did not press now, while she had him here and could bind him with a promise to return to her, she risked him not returning at all. His family, who he loved (always) more, would keep him from her. The Fëanorions were so wrapped up in each other that in the past Maglor had followed his father and brothers into the wilds without sending a word of his leaving.

“It grows so lonely here without you. Come back to bed. Lie with me a moment.” 

“You know I cannot linger.” He laced up his leggings, his back to her, the stiff line of his shoulders building a wall between them. 

Irimë could not let him leave like this. Her voice took on a vulnerable note, “You will not come back.” Folding desperation into it, hands fisting the sheets as he looked back at her, “Every time it is _I_ begging for scraps of your love! Cannot you see how you are hurting me? One day you will leave me for another. Countless women must throw themselves at you in Tirion while I am forgotten here on this mountain!”

“You know that is not true.” The look he cast back at her over the line of his shoulder was closed (as if he had to guard himself against her).

“How can I know that when you are never here?” Her lip trembled. She hated lowering herself to these displays, but it became harder and harder to draw him back. 

His mouth thinned. “I cannot slip away so easily. My brothers have long suspected I have a lover. Only your identity remains unknown, and I cannot risk it.”

“I would risk it for you. But I am never enough to come back to when your father—” His nostrils flared, a misstep on her part. She mustn’t pit his love for her against that which he bore his family. Resentment churned in her belly, but she chased his retreating body, capturing his hands. She brought them to her lips and kissed his palms, “I cannot bear our partings; the thought of your absence brings out the worst in me. Forgive me.” 

He sighed. There was too much weight, too much weariness in that breath. She kissed his skin more desperately. “You know I only want to see you happy, don’t you? I will speak no more of your father. I know how you dislike it.”

“Forget it.” He drew his hands away. “And I will not speak of my father either, for you understand not the first thing about him.”

Hot words sprang to her tongue, but she swallowed them back. There was no quicker way to drive Maglor from her bed than to speak ill of his family. But she understood Fëanor a good deal better than Maglor, who could not see his father with clear eyes. Oh yes, she understood that selfish, spoiled creature.

“Let us not quarrel, my love, but tell me when you shall return to me?” She smiled at him, a smile she knew was full of beauty. “My skin longs for yours when you are away. Do not leave me with nothing to fill the lonely nights.” She wrapped her arms around his waist where he’d withdrawn to the bed’s edge, and bent her head to kiss his chest, mouth running up to his shoulders. “Say you will return within the month.”

“I cannot.”

“No, return to me, my love!” She kissed his neck. 

“Enough, Irimë! I cannot.”

She pushed away from him, “You _won’t_. Why are you forever pushing me away when all I have ever done is love you? I have given you everything I am, Maglor, why isn’t that enough?”

Guilt flashed in his eyes, and he softened to her with a sigh, though he did not tell her he loved her. The words had not passed his lips in years. “You know this is the way it must be between us. I do not know what else you want from me.”

She knew him so well, knew just what act to play to turn him to putty in her hands, and just which ones to tread lightly about lest his voice cool. But the game had grown tricky of late. He’d matured into a man of full stature and come into his own. He’d learned what it felt like to have every eye in the room riveted on him, his beauty, his unparalleled talent, enthralled in the sound of his voice. He was no longer an inexperienced youth fresh out of years in the wild, eager to explore another’s body, with an open heart oh-so-easily plucked.

Before she could seal the game, the bedchamber door flew open. A fey spirit of summer-blue eyes, a grin like a pickle, and a wealth of golden hair more precious than all the gemstones in her peal-inlaid jewelry box, dashed in. 

She snatched up the sheets, pressing them to her breast as her son skidded to a stop, wide eyes darting between Irimë’s sheet-covered form and Maglor’s naked chest. Her son’s fingers fluttered like nervous bird wings around a toy boat.

She swallowed thickly, cursing necessity and secrecy that had forced her to send the servants away lest they tell their lord, her husband, of Maglor’s presence in the villa. She’d sent Glorfindel to play by the stream, but it seemed he’d grown tired of sending his boat sailing down the rocky mountain brook. Usually such play would entertain him for hours, but luck was against her this day. Without a minder to prevent him from bursting into his mother’s rooms like a whirlwind, her son had stumbled upon a scene he was too young to witness but not young enough to misunderstand.

Glorfindel’s mouth was a soft O as his huge eyes trailed slowly over Maglor’s bare chest. Irimë’s stomach knotted as her son’s innocence revealed more than the normal curiously of a child observing a full-grown adult. He was too young to comprehend the desires that would turn his head and send heat coiling lower than his belly in a few years, but its first stirrings were already upon him: whispered conversations with other boys as they speculated on girls and that grow-up thing called sex, and the first tentative explorations under the bedcovers with only Telperion’s light for witness.

Maglor shifted under the child’s too-bold stare. “Glorfindel!” Irimë’s voice came harsh with fear, and snapped the child’s eyes back to her. 

She wondered if this was some punishment of the gods for her lust. But why must they punish her son for the parents’ sin? Glorfindel had been conceived in sin, the child of an incestuous relationship between aunt and nephew. Maglor didn’t know, Glorfindel didn’t know, and her husband hadn’t even a sliver of suspicion, but she knew. She saw the kindling of deviant desires in her son’s eyes as he looked upon, not only a male, but his unknown _father_ , as punishment for her and Maglor’s flaunting of the laws.

If this was a punishment, than the Valar had underestimated Irimë, daughter of Finwë, if they thought she’d accept it submissively. She’d see this unnaturalness stamped out of her son if it broke her. She’d gouge these perverse desires out of her son while he was yet young and malleable, so that when he reached maturity he’d be safely cloistered in the delights of female wiles. It was for the best. Glorfindel would only face a life of disgrace if any discovered this deviance in him.

“Glorfindel darling,” she called her son forward.

“Mother,” a blush rode his cheeks, and he cast his gaze down as he approached her scantly covered body. He was too young to have witnessed his mother in bed with a man who was not his supposed father, but Irimë was almost thankful now that he’d discovered them. It was better to know of her son’s desires now, while he was still fixable. 

His fingers curled shyly about his toy boat as he darted glances back at Maglor from beneath thick lashes. This would not do. Irimë placed her hand on Glorfindel’s storm of hair, calling her son’s attention back to her. “I am sure you are confused, even frightened—”

“I’m not frightened!” Glorfindel declared with all the passion of young boys desperate to prove they weren’t ‘babies’ anymore.

She smiled down at him indulgently, “Of course not. I am very proud of you for being so brave.” He beamed at the praise, head tilting into the fingers combing through his curls. “In fact, I have a special mission for my Golden Knight if he is up to the task.”

He nodded, an earnest expression on his face. They’d played this game before, but never had it held such importance as it did in this moment.

“It is a secret that you must seal in your heart as if the Kingdom’s fate rests solely upon it. It must never pass your lips, do you understand?”

“Yes, Mother,” Glorfindel said, all seriousness.

“Good. Promise me, my Golden Knight, that you will never speak to anyone about Maglor being here today, or that you have seen us together. Especially not to your father. He won’t understand.”

Glorfindel gave her a knowing look that jarred with the plumpness of cheeks still caring baby fat, and eyes usually so guileless. Irimë suppressed the urge to squirm under her son’s gaze. If there was any doubt before it was now torn away: Glorfindel knew what it meant for two adults to be unclothed in the same room, or knew as much as any child could. But he said, after a moment of tension in which Irimë feared he’d refuse her and break the rules of their childish game, “I promise, Mother. I won’t tell anyone Cousin Maglor was here, not even Father.”  
Irimë winced at the reminder of Maglor’s familial relationship. 

As Maglor stepped around the bed to ruffled Glorfindel’s curls, Irimë was thankful for Glorfindel’s coloring that blinded Maglor to Glorfindel’s true parentage. But Glorfindel’s Vanyarin-fair hair and blue eyes could only do so much to disguise the familiar bone structure of his face. Irimë feared, as Glorfindel matured, his resemblance to his true father would become more apparent.

She wished she could have told Maglor that the child he even now smiled at as he complimented the boy’s proudly displayed boat was his son. But she knew Maglor. He’d want a relationship with Glorfindel. He wouldn’t be able to hide his attachment, and he’d become jealous of another man’s place as father in his son’s life and end up doing something rash and foolishly noble (like claim Glorfindel publicly). 

She wished he would. She wished he’d scoop them both up and carry them back to Tirion. But just as she knew Maglor would fight to be part of his son’s life, she also knew it would not end there. Maglor’s love went first and foremost to his father and brothers, and if they forced him to choose between them and his lover, he would always, _always_ , choose them.

She had Maglor escort a chattering Glorfindel from the room, her son skipping ahead and singing praise for his pony that he’d set his heart on Maglor meeting. After Irimë slipped on a gown and pulled her thick hair back, she followed them down to the stables. She fisted her long skirts to keep the hem from tailing in the mud and horse droppings as she picked her way through the stables and out to the paddock beyond. 

She found her son seated high on the back of Maglor’s storm-grey stallion, with her lover holding him from behind, controlling the proud beast with nothing but the melody of his voice. 

Glorfindel beamed as the wind danced through his hair, playing with it like sunlight. His cheeks were pink with the wind’s kiss, and his eyes two pieces of the summer sky. Irimë had never seen him so happy with his false father Calaher, her husband. It made her yearn all the more to reveal the special bond her son shared with Maglor. But the truth threatened too much.

Glorfindel’s abandon pony stamped its foot in jealously where it stood neglected and envious beside the paddock’s fence. The pony’s white mane had been braided with little tinkering bells, and its tail threaded with colorful ribbons. Looking at her son’s flamboyant pony, Irimë wondered if she should have picked up on Glorfindel’s abnormalities earlier. Well, it was not too late to straighten out her son’s soft, bent edges and lead him back to the proper path. 

As Maglor pulled the stallion into a walk and steered them back towards the gate and Irimë’s waiting figure, she caught his eye. With one look he stole her breath. Heat twisted in her belly and rose in her throat. With just one look she’d gone dry-mouthed with lust.

Maglor slid as lithe as a cat from the horse’s back, and reached up to haul Glorfindel down, his hands cupped under the boy’s armpits. As Maglor ruffled Glorfindel’s hair and flashed him a shared, secret smile between boys, Irimë feared the red infusing her son’s cheeks was not solely from exertion. 

“Maglor,” she called him away from her son. Maglor did not see the way Glorfindel’s face fell as Maglor left him to come to Irimë. 

Irimë closed the distance to Maglor swiftly. She would not let him leave without a kiss. She slipped her arms around his neck, and sealed her mouth to his.

He returned the kiss –briefly. He pushed her body back from its flush against his, and twisted a look back at Glorfindel. Glorfindel watched them, head cocked like a curious, wondering bird. He smiled like sunrise when Maglor looked his away.

“Maglor,” she snapped. He looked back at her with a frown. She smoothed over the lines of tension in her face with a smile more beautiful than any sunrise. “Promise me you will return.”

A pause. His face was inches from hers and yet miles apart. He was somewhere else, back in Tirion with his brothers, or in the sprawling mess of a manner house Fëanor had raised a pack of wild boys in with his plain wife.

Her fingers dug into his arms. “You have to come back to me. _Promise me_.” Between her words squatted the leaden shadows of words lying forever between them: the words she’d used to hook him back when –almost—he escaped her arms. They were words that promised a heart that could not beat without its lover, words of death and madness.

Maglor examined her with a shuttered expression, as if weighing how long he could remain absent from her arms before she began fading or acted on the revenge she swore against him if he _abandoned_ her. She had meant every threat. She was not a woman easily scorned.

“You’re coming back, aren’t you Cousin Maglor?” Glorfindel’s high, hopeful voice piped up.

Maglor turned from her fully, shaking off her hold, and faced Glorfindel with crooked smile, a spark of mischief in his eyes, “Would you like that, sweetheart?”

Color swooped into Glorfindel’s cheeks, and his thick lashes lowed like fans over his eyes. His mouth curled into a secret little smile as he looked up at Maglor through his lashes, displaying a disturbing blend of coyness and innocence. Irimë’s stomach rolled. There was no time to waste; her son had been cursed with the loose nature of a bed boy. 

“Yes, very much,” Glorfindel breathed in a tone far too close to flirtation. 

Irimë was not imagining things, Maglor saw it too, but spoke no word of censure. His smile only grew sweeter, eyes softening as he looked upon Glorfindel. He said, his enthralling voice gentled, “Then I promise to return. You must practice your riding and show me how you improved when next I visit. What do you say, dear-heart? Deal?”

Glorfindel’s cheeks did not know they should be ashamed of the high, pink color riding them, his eyes did not know they spilling all his secrets out for the world to mock and shun, and his voice, untrained in concealment, poured his perversion out into the air like blood spraying from a wound, “I’ll practice every day! I promise!”

Maglor laughed, the sound pure and dazzling as diamonds. He closed the distance to Glorfindel and squeezed his shoulder. Though an innocent touch, it encouraged Glorfindel’s infatuation and Maglor should have known better. Glorfindel, who possessed all the subtly and restraint of the wanton, basked in the touch. It was a vile display, and Irimë determined to keep Maglor away from Glorfindel from now on.

She pulled Maglor away from her son, leading him to his horse (perhaps the first time in their acquaintance she was the one to hustle _him_ out). “The hour grows late.”

Maglor did not deny her words, but lengthened his stride, pulling away from her. As he swung into the saddle, she caught at his hand, “You promised to return to me.”

His eyes flickered down to her, remote as starlight. She read in his face the correction he did not voice: he promised _Glorfindel_ to return. But he nodded, sharply, and turned his horse’s head to the gate.

“Good-bye, Cousin!” Glorfindel called, running up to keep pace beside Maglor’s horse and waving. Maglor flashed a last smile at Glorfindel, lifting his hand in farewell, before urging his horse into a trot and clearing the gate.

He did not look back at her for one last drink at the banquet table of her beauty. She set her jaw. He had given his word; he would return to her. She just needed more time to work on his heart and coax the love he’d once carried for her back into life. 

If only he did not dwell so far away; if only she were not cloistered up here in this gilded cage. 

She looked about the secluded villa nestled on the knees of Taniquetil with distaste. The Vanyar were a pious, remote people, secluded by their zealous devotion to the Valar. They peeked out of curtained windows as she walked their city streets –forever an outsider—as if they could judge her upon her devotion to the Valar just by the way she walked or the hour she shopped. Their ladies gossiped behind closed doors, trays of delicacies before them and the light wines the Vanyarin were famous for in their goblets. They picked over who’d been seen doing what, and who was neglecting their worship at Manwë and Varda’s feet, all the while secure in their own virtuousness and pharisaical thoughts.

Irimë did not go up the Mountain to worship the Valar, for which she earned scandalous looks and no playmates for her son. For who would send their children to play with the child of an apostate? Her husband, on the other hand, was an honored lord of the Vanyar, and a devoted follower of the Valar. 

It had been an arranged marriage. When her father made no effort to find her a match with a suitable Noldo lord, her mother took up the neglected duty. After so many years enduring the critical eyes of the Noldorin court that forever compared her to Míriel, Indis had wanted a happier, simpler life for her daughter. 

Maglor had been no more than a runny-noised child at the time, far from the man who’d one day steal her heart and make her bitterly regret the marriage vows that bound her to her husband without hope of legal separation. 

As the pine trees swallowed up her lover, Irimë stuffed down the regrets that rubbed like sandpaper against her throat. She lifted her chin into the mountain wind. She would know happiness again, even if she had to wrestle Maglor’s heart, black and blue, back to her.

She steered her son inside to await her husband’s return from Manwë’s feet. She sat Glorfindel down and began the long labor of purging his unnatural desires. It would be a hard and painful road, but one she was determined to endure –for her son’s sake.


	2. Chapter 2

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 2

Irimë hurried to greet her brother, slippered feet flying over the flagstones, dress bunched in her fists to give her legs more freedom. The great wrought iron gates of her husband’s villa yawned open to emit her brother’s horse. 

As he reigned in his mount and slid gracefully from his saddle, Irimë flung herself on him with a joyfully cry. “Fingolfin!”

“Little sister.” He enclosed her in a tight embrace. 

She held him with the sharp-edge of desperation, like a prized jewel lost but now found. Her brother’s visits were rare, and she seldom escaped this oppressive mountain. Fingolfin’s duties as a prince of Tirion, husband, and father kept him much occupied and far from her side. She’d not seen him since Glorfindel’s Naming Ceremony. 

Fingolfin pushed her away gently. “There is someone I would like you to meet.” He drew her attention to the small figure sitting unnoticed atop his horse. The child’s hands clasped the saddle horn, eyes as blue as Fingolfin’s, as blue as Fingon’s, stared down at her in fright.

“Irimë, meet your nephew, my grandson Guilin.” Fingolfin swung the child effortlessly from the saddle. When Guilin found his feet on the graveled path, Fingolfin rested his hands proudly on his grandson’s shoulders.

Irimë frowned. She judged the child to be some years younger than her own son, yet she had received no news of his birth. “You did not tell me Turgon had a second child.” 

Fingolfin’s star-bright eyes held hers steadily as he said, “Guilin’s father is not Turgon, but Fingon.”

Fingon was not wed. “I see,” she said slowly, “and the mother?”

“My mama’s gone away,” the child piped up, finding his courage in the strong hands of his grandfather. The child’s black head tilted up to catch a glimpse of Fingolfin’s face, seeking approval. Fingolfin gave Guilin a tender smile, lifting one hand to run soothing fingers through the boy’s wavy locks.

“I thought your son might like a playmate for the afternoon,” Fingolfin said. She did not fail to note he’d not answered her question on the child’s origins, but perhaps it was better to wait until the boy’s sensitive ears were out of range.

“Glorfindel would like that.” It would be good for Glorfindel to have a friend, even if it was only for the day and their ages were not matched. 

She called a servant and had her son fetched. Glorfindel came bounding through the open veranda doors, rounding the corner sharply, and escalating when he reached the open gardens and the front courtyard. His hair whipped a wild banner of light behind him. He skidded to a stop beside his mother, white pebbles flying, and thin chest heaving. He had eyes only for the strangers, a rare treat in their secluded home. He stared at them boldly, eyes alight with curiosity.

Irimë tisked at Glorfindel’s boisterous display. Her son was usually a well-behaved child who took care to groom himself as he’d been taught, even if his hair was naturally a bit wild. She’d never had issues with Glorfindel rolling about in the stable’s hay or coming home drenched in mud. But Glorfindel did have a tendency to be overly excitable at times and forget himself and his manners.

At his mother’s sound of disapproval, a flush stole over his cheeks. He fidgeted with his tunic, casting indiscreet peeks up at the towering form of Fingolfin and the dwarfed one of Guilin through his lashes.

“This is my son Glorfindel,” Irimë introduced, and to her son, “greet your Uncle Fingolfin and Cousin Guilin.” 

Glorfindel gave his uncle a little bow, hand twisted properly across his chest. Fingolfin said, “He is a beautiful child. You must be proud.”

“Indeed,” Irimë laid a hand on Glorfindel’s messy head. 

“Why don’t you take Guilin to play,” she urged Glorfindel. She had much to catch up on with Fingolfin, not the least of which was the unexpected arrival of her unknown great-nephew. Glorfindel took his cousin’s hand in his bigger one. The little boy tangled his free hand in his grandfather’s belt. 

Fingolfin gently loosed the boy’s hand, “Go with Glorfindel, Guilin. I shall be close by if you have need of me.” Then he pinned Glorfindel with a stern gaze, “I do not want to hear of you playing roughly with my grandson.”

Glorfindel’s head bobbled like a blue-jay under his uncle’s regard, and he gave a hasty ‘Yes, sir,’ before pulling Guilin away.

Irimë gave her brother a chiding look. “There was no need to be so hard on him.”

Fingolfin shrugged one shoulder, somehow making the gesture elegant. “I have learned, after raising two sons of my own, that setting firm expectations is the best way to keep young boys in line.”

She compressed her lips, but did not refute the philosophy. She led him from the courtyard, up the front terrace steps, and through the entrance doors which were still hanging open from Glorfindel’s boisterous exit. When they reached the atrium, Irimë called for wine and refreshments. As they awaited the servant’s return, Fingolfin took a few minutes to study one of the room’s magnificent wall paintings, this one depicting a gathering of Vanyar dancing before the throne of Manwë. 

“Fascinating,” he said, a wry tip to his mouth as he turned away to settle in one of the plush, scroll-backed couches.

Irimë ignored the underlying mockery. They were both well aware of each other’s less than pious hearts. She said, as the servants finished laying a plate of pears, almond cakes soaked in honey, and clams, “Tell me about the child. How is it I never heard of his existence before this afternoon?”

Fingolfin picked up the stone pitcher and poured himself a goblet of chilled wine. “I have not known my grandson much longer.” He sighed as his cool, unflappable facade melted away. He was with his sister now. With her, he could release the pressures of courtly life and the responsibilities of a Noldo prince and be her beloved brother. 

“I am sure you have heard, even here, of my eldest’s many…conquests.”

Irimë nodded. Even on the Holy Mountain rumors of a Noldo prince’s indiscretions were traded, gobbled up by greedy ears to be passed on by wagging tongues hungry for another’s faults. It was said Prince Fingon had a new bed partner every week, and left a trail of heartbroken maidens in his wake. She did not believe half of it, but all rumors held a kernel of truth.

“Guilin’s mother left him on the palace steps like a sack of rubbish. She demanded, loud enough for most of the Great Square to hear, Fingon come out and fetch his son or she would leave the boy on the nearest street corner.”

Irimë covered her mouth. “No!”

Fingolfin nodded grimly. “In the woman’s defense –if any can be granted one who abandons their child— the girl’s own parents cast her from their home, not wishing their other daughters to carry the _stain_ of their sister’s disgrace. The girl was without a means to support herself or a child. She fled to Alqualondë. The Teleri are more accepting of these matters than the Noldor, or the Vanyar.”

Irimë shuddered at the thought of the girl’s fate had her unwed pregnancy been discovered in the Vanyar’s city. 

Fingolfin surprised her by saying, “I followed her to Alqualondë. But I could not suffer her presence in my household, or in service to my wife or daughter, for I found, when I discovered her under a new lover’s roof and comfortable enough among the open-minded Teleri, that I could not forgive her. Not for how she disposed of her own son.” 

“I am surprised her parents did not try to force her into the service of Lady Vairë as one of her Handmaidens. Though I suppose her lack of _virginity_ bared that ‘salvation,’” Irimë’s lip curled.

She would not have blamed the woman for running away from such a fate as that and choosing the Teleri over a life of sworn celibacy at Lady Vairë’s looms, encloistered in the Halls of Waiting where Vairë dwelt with her husband, Lord Námo. Lady Vairë’s looms spun the story of the world, but it seemed more a punishment than an honor to waste one’s life weaving someone else’s. Those women were already dead, at least to everything that made life worth living. They had forsaken the living world for the one they wove in tapestries. 

“Traditionally they are maidens,” Fingolfin agreed, “but more than one lord has sent their daughter, or wife, into Vairë’s service after a scandal.”

She would never allow herself to grow used to the belts of chastity men were ever eager to slip about women, like they would muzzle a dog. “Fingon was more than capable of providing for her and the child.”

Fingolfin met her eyes squarely. “Fingon did not know of Guilin’s existence. He says the woman never contacted him after their liaison.”

“Do you believe him?” she asked bluntly. 

“Yes.” The words sliced through the air without doubt. “I believe my son when he says he had never laid eyes on Guilin until his mother abandoned him.”

“You have no doubts at all?” Irimë prodded.

Fingolfin was silent a moment, but when he raised his eyes they burned with unshakable belief. “None. My son has made mistakes, but he is not cruel. He can be thoughtless and self-serving of his desires, but he has a good heart.”

Irimë did not press the issue. She had only met her nephew a handful of times and could hardly judge his character. Maglor had spoken of his cousin at times, usually in conjuncture with Maedhros, for the two had formed a friendship, and she’d detected no contempt in Maglor’s words or body as he spoke of Fingon. But Maglor had a tendency to overlook a person’s faults if he loved them or if someone he loved held them dear, so she couldn’t trust his judgment on Fingon’s character.

Resolving to let the matter lie, she turned instead to Fingolfin’s other children, hoping to ease the tension from her brother’s face. “Tell me how Turgon and little Idril fare?”

“Turgon and his family are well. Idril is growing up to be quite the little lady,” Fingolfin replied proudly. “Turgon is a good father. A steadfast, loyal man. Which is what our people need in these troubling times.”

“And dear Aredhel?” She’d taken a special liking to her niece. The girl was free spirited and headstrong, and thought it would be a grand adventure in her youth to visit her mysterious aunt who lived up the Holy Mountain. Irimë had enjoyed every one of Aredhel’s rebellious visits, especially since they brought Fingolfin at their heels.

Fingolfin rose from the settee to pace along the lip of the tiled pool that centered the atrium. His movements were abrupt, hinting at a tidal wave of emotions lurking just beneath the veneer of control. After he’d loosed some of his wild energy, he turned sharply back to her and said crisply, “I cannot hope you have not heard gossip of my daughter’s affair with _that boy_.” 

Irimë blinked. “I have heard nothing.”

That pulled Fingolfin up short, a faint hope kindling his eyes. “Perhaps the scandal is not as well-known as I feared. A few more months though and there will not be an Elf in Valinor who does not know my daughter is involved with _Celegorm Fëanorion_ ,” Fingolfin said the name through clenched teeth.

Irimë studied her brother’s face, wondering if it was the closeness of blood that angered him, his daughter’s delicate reputation, or Celegorm’s father who most upset him. Either way, she thought with despair, she knew now Fingolfin would never accept her own affair. 

She’d whispered her worries and hopes many times to the dark when the yearning for Maglor went so deep she barely restrained herself from packing up, leaving her husband, this lonely mountain, throwing her reputation to the wind, and seeking out her lover no matter the cost. But she had the answer to all her secret fears: Fingolfin would not welcome her home if she came on the arm of Maglor Fëanorion. Not how things stood between Fingolfin and their half-brother Fëanor, which she believed was the hardest stone to swallow in his daughter’s rebellion: that she would defy him for a Fëanorion.

Fingolfin scrubbed a hand down his face. “My daughter has always been full of spirit. She cannot be corralled, and I would never wish to slip a bridle around her neck. I have done my best not to break her spirit. I understood the more I tried hold onto her, the more she would slip through my fingers. I tried to give her freedom, but this...” He looked at her with weary eyes. “What have I done wrong? Should I have been stricter with her? Not been so lenient, not given in to her nature so easily?”

Irimë rose and went to him, placing a gentling hand upon his arm. “You take too much blame upon yourself.”

“If not her father than who is to blame?”

“Is it really so terrible? Times are changing. The younger generations are less inhibited and more forgiving of such things as the Teleri’s influence spreads.” She could not stop the longing from twining between her words. 

Oh how she wished she dwelt among the Last Comers, the Teleri who loved the sea and freedom. They still tasted the wild lands of Middle-earth, and wore its mysteries knit into their skin in strange inkings that the Eldest yet bore. Instead she was bound and caged upon a mountaintop built with laws and regulations, ruled by Vanyar ever on the look-out for others’ sins so their own holiness might shine all the brighter. 

Fingolfin’s mouth twisted. “You have been too long away from Tirion if you truly believe that.” Irimë frowned at the dark things hiding between Fingolfin’s words, whispering of secrets. 

He spun away to pace out his distress upon the floor. “It always comes back to _Fëanor._ ” He murmured to himself, and then raged, voice flinging against the walls like a spear: “What unholy magic does your blood posses that you would snare even my children in your fire?” Anger and jealously, longing and disappointments, love and resentment. They were everything Fingolfin had ever felt for his half-brother.

Irimë hated Fëanor afresh as the words confirmed that nothing had changed between the brothers, though she’d hoped, foolishly, it would as Fingolfin aged. 

Fingolfin stood rooted to the ground, stance wide as he stared unseeing at the wall painting. His head was unbowed, shoulders straight and proud. She thought him magnificent. A true prince of the Noldor as Fëanor, consumed with his craft and greedy wanderings for more and more knowledge, had never been.

She approached his stern figure and let her head drop between the blades of his shoulders. She hated seeming him like this. Only Fëanor could turn her brother into a walking mass of confusion, yearning, and envy.

Fëanor was a loathsome name in her mind, like a leech stealing others’ happiness, or a spider spinning webs of domination and stirring what ought not to be stirred in Elven-hearts. 

As children she’d watch Fingolfin chase after Fëanor time and time again, ever fresh with the adoration of a child chasing after his hero even when that hero cast cruel words back in his face. Fingolfin had loved Fëanor, worshiped him as only a little brother could worship the elder. He followed Fëanor around like a faithful puppy, desperate to prove his courage, his gown-upness, his worth to Fëanor. Desperate not to be left behind. Fingolfin would come back with stars in his eyes, and tell her of the grand adventures he and his big brother had shared. 

Fëanor did not know of the love Fingolfin still bore for him, else she was sure he would have manipulated it to his uses. For in the end, despite the confident, powerful image Fingolfin wore as a prince of the Noldor, that secret longing for Fëanor’s attention lingered. Wherever Fëanor led, Fingolfin would follow. Always.

“Enough of that.” She pushed off Fingolfin’s back. She wished she could break Fëanor’s hold on Fingolfin as easily. “It is not the end of the world that Aredhel has fallen in with a Fëanorion. I have heard nothing but praise for Maedhros, and even here on Taniquetil we know of the great friendship forged between the lines of Fëanor and Fingolfin with Maedhros and Fingon’s friendship.”

Fingolfin’s smile was bitter-sweet. “Fëanor has created many wonders: the Seeing-stones, the Fëanorion lamps, Tengwar, and of course the Silmarilli, but I covet most his firstborn. Would that Maedhros were my own son. But he is Fëanor’s, and utterly loyal to his father’s House, above even his friendship with Fingon which has grown strained of late –no doubt a result of Fëanor’s influence. Fëanor has no great love for any child of mine.”

“So you have no grievance against Maedhros but the blood in his veins?” she asked, snidely.

“I know what you are implying, but I do not disapprove of Maedhros because of his blood. I am fond of him, to tell the truth, but his loyalty is unshakably given to his family. He takes his responsibilities as Fëanor’s firstborn seriously. Even when his father and he clash, Maedhros’ loyalty is absolute.”

Irimë’s mouth dipped in bitterness, thinking of Maglor. Fëanor had knit his sons closer than the tightest silk. Their long wanderings had ensured they formed close bonds, and their best friends and playmates had always been each other. What other option had they had in the wilds of Valinor? A raccoon?

She challenged Fingolfin’s assessment on Aredhel’s fate though, “This affair between Aredhel and Celegorm will have to be contained, but is not the end of Arda.”

Fingolfin turned sharply, clear blue eyes snapping. “Contained? It is far passed containment! Half the court already whispers of it, and the other half will soon follow. There is only so much I can do to protect her should someone go running off to Valimar to draw the Valar’s eye!”

Irimë turned away, walking back to the couches and shallow pool cutting a square in the atrium’s heart. Her fingers tapped out a rhythm on the lip of her wine glass as her thoughts scrambled one over the other. “I think it is time I returned to Tirion. I have been too long away.” 

Instead of the pleased welcome she’d been expecting from her brother, he said, “Things are…delicate as they stand now. And Fëanor…you have never been friendly.”

“Nor have I wished to be.” She tossed her curls.

“You set him off like salt in an open-wound.” 

“Because he no more likes me than our mother, and I possess too much of Indis’ looks. He forgets we share the same father.”

“Fëanor forgets nothing. It is _because_ we share the same father that he loathes us.” Fingolfin’s mouth twisted in a pain he couldn’t quite suppress.

“It is not loathing, but jealousy.” 

“Jealousy?” Fingolfin’s bewilderment stemmed from the knowledge that his own father had ever praised and loved Fëanor above him (above them all), and that none could rival Fëanor in strength of mind, cunning, skill in the forge, or beauty of face and body.

For as much as her brother studied Fëanor –eyes, heart, mind, and ears ever upon him, eager to hear word of Fëanor’s many wanderings, what new work of beauty he’d forged, what words had dropped from his lips –Fingolfin seemed to know Fëanor less than she. Or maybe she just didn’t blind herself with hope that their brother would ever look upon any of Indis’ children with love. “He is possessive of father’s love. He cannot bear the thought of Finwë loving us more than him.”

Fingolfin waved his hand through the air. “Jealousy is not the word I would use. Perhaps fear, but Fëanor is not truly afraid of anything. Though he must be blind and deaf not to see how Finwë adores him above all others.” 

“No, it is jealousy as well. You are the true prince of the Noldor and Fëanor knows it. He knows that you are more like Father than he ever will be. He envies you for your closeness to Father.”

“Is envy truly the root of all this?” Fingolfin voice turned wondering, still doubtfully, but considering. The revelation seemed to quiet something deep within him, yet as much as it soothed him so too did it fuel him. The light of calculation and a long-unquenched hunger lit his face with a fey glow, twisting it into something both beautiful and terrifying. 

He was planning something. And it had to do with Fëanor. When did it not? 

Irimë feared her brother plotted something hinging upon his desperate, secret, never-dampened craving for Fëanor’s attention. “What is it? What are you thinking?”

He turned to her, surprised, as if he’d forgotten not only her presence but her very existence next to the fire that was Fëanor. She hated Fëanor all the more.

“Of this I can forgive him. And easily! Fëanor has said disturbing things of late. And I had feared…there have been rumors that I gave credence to, and taken precaution against, that now I see may be folly.”

“What rumors?” 

“It has been whispered that Fëanor is plotting to drive Finarfin and I from Tirion, for Fëanor has no love for us, and often I hear him speaking haughtily in the halls of our father. He has looked upon us with distrust, and perhaps jealously, though I thought the blackness of his look bespoke hate. Fëanor may attempt to drive us from our father’s side, and out of the city, if we do not take precautions. Or so I thought…but now, perhaps not all is as I feared.” 

He continued with even more disturbing news: “I have ordered the making of swords to defend our House. I have had them forged in secret, and armor and shields too. Many now walk the streets in such attire, their breasts glimmering with polished metal, cloaks of scarlet, green, and blue about their shoulders. It is a glorious sight, but it reeks of fear. The whole city is tense and heavy like the breath before a thunderclap. Yet if a storm is coming, our House shall be protected.”

“What madness is this? How do you intend to use these swords? Upon Fëanor?” But even as the words rang upon the air, she knew Fingolfin would never raise weapon against his resented (beloved) Fëanor.

Fingolfin blanched. “Of course not! They are only for protection against…I do not know, only that something is coming. You cannot feel it up here, on this mountain, but you can taste it in the air in Tirion. I will not let harm befall my people!”

“Don’t hide behind ‘love of your people.’ I know you are planning something, and I want to know what it is!” Fingolfin’s face shuttered, and that alone confirmed her suspicious that it concerned Fëanor. “You are going to do something foolish to gain his detestable attention, aren’t you? It is pathetic,” she spat, wishing to slap sense into him. “Fëanor doesn’t deserve to be an insect under your boot! When are you going to realize he has never loved you and never will!” 

Fingolfin’s face was a closed door and his voice soft and dangerous as darkness as he answered, “I am not ‘attempting to gain his attention.’ It is Fëanor who should watch himself. He becomes ever more arrogant, trying to lord himself over us. He thinks he can chase me from my father’s side, well we shall see about that.”

Irimë wanted to sneer at the blatant lies. Oh, Fingolfin would be employing every trick he’d learned in his long years of courting the Noldor nobles, but it wouldn’t be to stay at Finwë’s side, but Fëanor’s!

Her lips pressed into a tight, white line. “I think it is past time I return to the city of my birth and discover the full seed of this madness.”

Fingolfin crossed his arms. “What of your husband?” Yet again he tried to deny her coming, though she did not understand why.

“What of him?” she challenged. “Would you hold your own wife back if she wished to visit her father’s house?”

“Of course not, though Anairë is a Noldo and need walk no further than the Great Square to visit her kin. But I know your husband little, and Elenwë, Turgon’s wife, would never make plans of travel without consulting her husband first. Since she is a Vanya, I thought her example best followed now.”

Irimë narrowed her eyes. “I am a Noldo. I do not follow the simpering ways of a Vanya wife.”

“Elenwë is a good woman. I will not allow you to criticize my son’s wife.” Fingolfin’s voice ran hard and straight as steel.

“I should not have spoken of her thus, you are right,” she conceded, grudgingly. “It is only that I have been so long from our people, so long sequestered on this mountain. I am tired of being judged against the Vanyar: their wives, their devotion to the Valar. I wish to walk among the Noldor again.”

Fingolfin’s anger relented. He slipped an arm about her shoulders. “Then you shall come. Mother will be overjoyed at your return.” 

She rested her head on his shoulder, longing for the simple days of youth when they whispering their secret thoughts and desires into each other’s ears, knowing without doubt they would always be loved. She wished she could have that guarantee now. She felt the secrets lying between them like a thorned crown about her head. 

Now, at last, she felt guilt. With her brother’s presence by her side, she understood more fully the fear Maglor felt every time he rode up Mount Taniquetil to be with her: the fear of losing the love of their families. Still, she would choose Maglor above all others. But his choice would not be the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Note: My image of Fëanor and Fingolfin’s relationship has been heavily shaped by Spiced Wine’s work. I own much of my inspiration to Spiced Wine’s beautiful portrayal of these two magnificent characters.
> 
> *Guilin is Gwindor of Nargothrond’s father. A minor character in the Silmarillion, but Gwindor is referred to as a Prince of Nargothrond which is what inspired me to connect his lineage to the House of Finwë.


	3. Chapter 3

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 3

Fingolfin reached up to stroke Irimë’s hair. “It will be good to have you back home.”

Guilt tried to sink its claws into her back, but she shrugged it off, turning away from his caress as well. “We should find the children. Who knows what mischief they could be into by now?”

Fingolfin frowned, but followed her out of the atrium without comment. She could feel his questions as she led the way briskly through the corridors towards her son’s bedroom. She couldn’t explain her sudden withdraw without revealing the guilt behind it. 

She didn’t want this reawakened guilt. She thought she’d outgrown it. She thought she’d been so mature, so sophisticated and cultured that a bothersome conscience had no more place in her life than the Valar’s laws, but it seemed all she’d been doing was ignoring it. 

Up on Taniquetil, far from the ties of family, she’d found it easy to dream about the wonderful life she could be leading at Maglor’s side. But now the reality of confronting her brother’s face, her father’s, her mother’s, when they discovered her double sin –adultery and incest—caught up with her. 

She could already feel the censure and disappointment in their eyes like burning brands upon her skin. She tasted acid, and it was her past cavalierness. Could she really destroy every relationship in her life for the sake of Maglor’s love? The worst part of it all was that her son and family’s suffering still paled in importance to her own. 

Her mind spun away for these thoughts, stamping down the guilt like feet putting out a fire. Did she not deserve happiness with Maglor? Did she not deserve a life of her own making, free of laws and condemnation? Why should she be punished for love? She wanted her conscience to fall back to sleep, so she could crawl into that warm, powerful place where _she_ was master of her life.

Glorfindel’s room was empty. Perhaps they were playing outside by the little mountain stream. She was about to turn away, back down the corridor, when she heard giggles coming from her own bedchamber. The double oak doors stood slightly ajar.

“It looks like they did get into some mischief.” Fingolfin tilted her a smile as he covered the short distance between the bedchambers with powerful strides, and peeked in to see what the boys were up to.

Irimë pushed him out of the way, shoving the door open, a scolding for entering her rooms without permission sitting atop her tongue. But it tumbled off in shock at what she found. All the color drained from her cheeks and lips, before anger splashed hot in the high points of her cheekbones.

What she saw was this: her son wearing one of her fine gowns, the white silk accented by diamonds sown into the bodice and neckline. Rouge stained his cheeks and lips, painted red as a girl’s. The kohl she wore on festival days lined his eyes sloppily, the work of a child’s hand. About his neck hung a sapphire pendent, and his hair was strung with her best pearls.

It was horrifying. It was everything she’d feared and worse coming to life before not only her eyes, but Fingolfin’s. Thankfully no servants were there to witness and gossip later, and Guilin was too young to understand. The child clapped his hands, giggling along with Glorfindel at the picture his cousin made. The child pretended to bow, as a lord would to a lady, and complimented Glorfindel’s ‘pretty hair.’

Glorfindel curtsied back, and she exploded.

“Glorfindel!” Her voice cracked like a whip, and her son jumped, spinning around to face the door. Guilin darted behind his older cousin’s back, wrapping skinny fingers in the white dress. 

When Glorfindel saw his mother, he paled and his eyes dropped away. He knew he’d been naughty. Irimë wondered if he’d not taken in a word of the teachings she’d been drilling into his head since Maglor’s visit. She’d spoken over and over again on the importance of weeding out these impulses, and yet here he stood looking more like a little girl than her son.

“Take that dress off this instant!” she commanded, and at least the boy was still obedient in this. He shrugged the garment that was already hanging off his thin shoulders to the ground, until he stood only in leggings, the pendant all the more noticeable where it rested on his naked breastbone. “And the rest. Hurry!” She was mortified her brother had witnessed Glorfindel’s delinquent behavior.

As Glorfindel shed the pearls and sapphire pendent, Fingolfin said softly, disapprovingly, “They are just children, Irimë. Children will play. There is no harm in it.”

Irimë’s lips pursed. Her brother may think this just the mischief of children, but she knew it for what it was. It seemed lectures and punishments from her hand were not enough to expunge these dangerous desires from his mind. She’d have to take more drastic measures.

“My son shall be accompanying me to Tirion. He has not had the advantages of other young boys for playmates and examples. This behavior is not something I take lightly, Fingolfin. Was it not you who said boys need a strong hand?” She turned away from the distressing sight of her son’s painted face, intent on giving Fingolfin a challenging look, but it faltered under the one she was receiving. 

Fingolfin looked upon her as if he did not know her. She shivered at the coldness in his eyes and voice. “Did you not hear a word I said about Aredhel? I may have been a strict father at times, but that was in cases of my children’s safety, not in an attempted to _break_ who they were born to be.”

She refused to be cowed. He did not understand. He would not be saying such things if it was _his_ child looking forward to a fate of social outcast and marked sexual deviant. 

She loved Glorfindel. One day her son would thank her for helping him, and Fingolfin would see this had been the only way. The alternative was unthinkable. “Glorfindel is my son, and I will thank you not to tell me how to raise him,” she spoke more harshly than she’d intended. What had happened to the easy companionship they’d once shared?

His jaw clenched, the bones of his face sharpening until his cheekbones cut like blades. His hands clamped around her arms and he hauled her bodily from the room, slamming the doors behind him and pushing her none-too-gently up against the wall. 

A tremor of fear ran through her at the fell look in his eyes. Wild violence rolled off him like wings of flame. She did not know him. If it had been Fëanor handling her in this brutish manner, she would still have been shocked, for it to be Fingolfin was unthinkable. For the first time since Fingolfin had spoken of darkness in Tirion, she gave weight to his words. There were shadows piled atop shadows in his eyes, cloaking their jewel-brilliance even as they lit them as with a fey fire.

“Think carefully on your actions, _Sister_.” The word was stripped of gentle endearment, and fell cold and naked as iron. “If you continue down this course, I promise you you shall regret it.”

Irimë’s nostrils flared, and she forced her chin to jut out in defiance, even though a part of her shook inside. “You would threaten me?”

Fingolfin released her. She could visibly see how he struggled to regain control of himself. When he succeeded, he spoke again. His voice was cool and distant as the moon. “Threaten? No. It is merely a warning. Do you take me for a fool that I would not recognize what I saw in that room? I know what my nephew is, just as I see your plans as clear as calligraphy upon your face. And I am telling you, Irimë,” there was no warmth, but a touch of pleading she’d never heard in her proud brother’s voice before, “you will regret taking this path. Bitterly. I have known others who strove to strike natural desires out of their children because of fear or ‘love’ or disgust, but all it brought was pain and estrangement between parent and child. Do not do this, Irimë, or you will lose your son.”

Now Irimë’s limbs did shake, and she turned her face away, staring at the thick doors which stood like a wall between her and her son. “Who were they? These others?” Her eyes snapped back around. “One of your sons?”

Fingolfin shook his head solemnly. “Not mine, but there have been some among our people, sons and daughters, consumed by anger and bitterness because of the actions of their parents.”

Irimë frowned. “I have never heard of any such cases.”

Fingolfin slanted her a look. “Nor would you. They were always quickly hushed.”

Irimë worked her jaw, a conflict of emotions running across her face. “I don’t believe you. Maybe one or two parents did…cruel things to their children, but I love my son. And with love shall I heal his affliction.” She made to push him away, distressed and drained by his words, but he was upon her again, his fist crashing into the wall beside her head, frightening her badly. His face was a thundercloud.

“If you loved him you would accept him as Eru fashioned him!” 

Irimë looked at Fingolfin aghast. “You cannot believe such desires are acceptable?”

“I do not believe in condemning my—anyone on the basis of their desire.” He tried to cover his slip, but she had heard it. His what? He claimed none of his sons carried this perversion, and Aredhel could not prefer females based on her choice of Celegorm as lover, but someone Fingolfin was close to did lust after their own sex. It was the only explanation that fit Fingolfin’s passionate defense.

This revelation did not change her resolve for Glorfindel though. How could Fingolfin not understand the importance of what she was doing for her son? He was full of horror stories, trying to frighten her off the path she’d sworn to trod despite its harsh route. But she would not be swayed. It didn’t matter that Fingolfin claimed to accept such desires as natural, the majority of their people did not, and it was them who would make her son suffer.

“I am Glorfindel’s mother.” She drew herself up to her full height, though she couldn’t quite meet Fingolfin’s burning glare and had to settle for a point over his right shoulder. “How I raise my son is none of your concern.”

Fingolfin stared at her, gaze prickling her cheeks like nails. Then he breathed into her ear, the scorn in his voice making it a sick parody of a lover’s caress, “You are always so full of ideas, so sure you know best.” He stepped back, letting his fisted hand fall from the wall. 

She could not look at him. She brushed passed him, wanting the courage of her back to him as she continued speaking. She deliberately plowed passed the defensive words pressing against her throat. She didn’t need to defend her choices, she didn’t! She forced herself to say calmly, almost flippantly, “Fingon takes part in Lord Tulkas’ Games, does he not? I have heard your son is a great athlete, excelling in wrestling and foot races. I have been considering entering Glorfindel in the next Games. Perhaps Fingon could coach him, be a mentor to his young cousin.” 

Fingon would be perfect. She didn’t know of a man who exhibited the masculine qualities and a healthy appreciation for the female form more than her nephew.

Fingolfin’s eyes were coals on her nape. “Glorfindel is too young to compete. Fingon was almost of age when he entered his first Games.”

Irimë waved her hand, dismissing the concern. It wasn’t the competitions she was concerned with, but instilling healthy pursuits and desires in Glorfindel. “The earlier he starts training, the more he shall excel when he reaches maturity.” When Glorfindel was crowned winner of a competition, maybe even more than one like Fingon, women would flock to him. Once he received such attentions, he would be sure to learn appreciation for the opposite sex and put aside these perversions.

Fingolfin stalked around to face her, denying her the flimsy comfort of not meeting his eyes. He gave her another iron-eyed look. “He is far too young.”

“Glorfindel will enjoy it, and even you cannot deny he has been isolated from our family far too long. It is time he learned what it was to be a Noldo, not a soft-living Vanya,” she said with derision.

Fingolfin spun back to the bedchamber door, yanking it open without a word of acknowledgment to her. She forced down the shards of hurt cutting her throat. Why couldn’t he try to understand her side? He was being so cruel and cold. Didn’t he care how much he was hurting her?

She followed him into the room where the two boys stood subdued in the corner. Glorfindel had pulled on his tunic again, and twisted his fingers in edges frayed from worrying hands. Fingolfin strode over to the silent boys, and Guilin darted from his cousin’s shadow to clasp his grandfather’s hand. Fingolfin crouched down before Glorfindel, drawing Guilin against his side where the boy fit with practiced perfection. 

“Glorfindel,” Fingolfin addressed his nephew gently. “Your mother has decided to begin training you for Lord Tulkas’ Games. You will be coming to Tirion with your mother in a few weeks.” 

He crossed the distance between their bodies and caressed Glorfindel’s cheek with a large, calloused thumb. Glorfindel started, unaccustomed to excessive male attention. Irimë’s husband was reserved, and meager with physical affection. He was often away, or busy with the affairs of running the estate and his devoted servitude of the Valar. He had little time for his alleged son.

“When you come to Tirion,” Fingolfin continued, “you will always be welcome to play with my grandson.” Guilin bobbed his head, a huge grin breaking out on his face. 

Glorfindel smiled shyly. “I would like that, sir.”

“You can call me Uncle Fingolfin if you like, Glorfindel. I am your uncle not your lord,” Fingolfin corrected kindly. 

“Uncle Fingolfin,” Glorfindel tried hesitantly, and earned a warm smile from Fingolfin.

“So, Glorfindel, what do you think of your mother’s decision?”

Glorfindel bit his lip, sending anxious, darting glances at Irimë who stood with her arms crossed in the doorway. “I don’t know,” he whispered.

“Have you ever been to the Games?” 

Glorfindel shook his head.

“It is a series of contests testing strength, endurance, speed, also skills like horseback riding, hunting spears, and the bow. Do any of those catch your interest?”

Glorfindel cast another glance at Irimë before saying hesitantly, “I like riding my pony.”

Irimë winced at the look Fingolfin shot at her over his shoulder, but she kept her head high. Her son needed this. It was painfully apparent it now: Glorfindel was more Vanya than Noldo. 

Her son needed to shed the soft ways of the Vanyar, a people who spent their time on their knees, and take up the proud strength of the Noldor who knelt for no one. She would teach her son the ways of her people and his father’s people, until his mind, body, and soul were fused with steel. Glorfindel might not thank her for it today, and Fingolfin might not understand the vital necessity of her resolve, but she would cast her son into the fire so that he might be reforged into the proper mold. One day he would stand with the pride of a Noldo, unbent by the crippling perversions now staining him that threatened to chain him to shadows and fear if left unchallenged.


	4. Chapter 4

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 4

Wind funneled through the Cleft of Light, whipping through Tirion. The city was build upon the Mount of Túna, resting between the towering slopes of the Pelóri Mountains like a peal set between a woman’s breasts. To the south rose the tallest of the Pelóri, Taniquetil, the Holy Mountain, and Irimë’s cage. 

Tirion glared brilliant and sharp as a cut diamond in the high-glory of Laurelin’s light. If Alqualondë was the City of Pearl, than Tirion was the City of Marble. Even the lowliest of dwellings had been built with the stone. 

The city did not sprawl; she was far too dignified and proud for such behavior. She mirrored the strong, poised lines of the people who had built her stone by stone, cobbled street by cobbled street. And her white towers scraping the sky, shouldering puffy clouds aside, bordered on hubris. Every part of the city had been carefully planned down to the last capstone.

From her vantage point, standing upon one of the palace’s many winged terraces, Irimë could see the Great Gates of the city and the shinning quartz-crystal steps beyond. Banners carrying Finwë’s golden starburst snapped in the wind. Others bore the heraldic devices of the Noldorin princes: Fëanor’s motley colored one which was said to resemble the Silmarils casting back rainbows of light, and Fingolfin’s yellow star set within a night sky. 

Irimë inhaled freedom. She had missed the city of her birth like a physical ache that had finally been soothed. She felt like she’d been submersed in deep water for years and only now tasted sweet-air again. The high, wild winds of Tirion were like lost playmates. They swirled her skirts and whipped her hair into knots, tossing it out like wings about her. She smiled, tilting her face into the caress.

A child’s giggle shattered her reunion. Her hands fisted the jasper railing, wishing she could squeeze patience from its smooth, red stone. When she’d regained enough control not to snap at the boys for yet again becoming sidetracked from their studies, she abandoned the terrace and returned to her spacious rooms. 

Glorfindel and Guilin’s thumbs wrestled. They fell into muffled laughter as they struggled for dominance, though Glorfindel, sensitive child that he was, let his younger cousin win more often than not. Their practice lines of Tengwar lay neglected on the table before them. Uncapped bottles of ink jostled dangerously in their play, and feather quills dripped blots of black onto their practice letters. 

Irimë marched over and snatched the worksheets out from under their elbows, startling them and putting an end to their disobedient behavior. She ran a critical eye over their Tengwar script. Guilin’s was barely legible, though it was a start for a child of his limited years, but Glorfindel’s work reflected his distraction. She had taught her son better than this chicken-scratch.

“What is this, Glorfindel?” she demanded.

Glorfindel bit his lip and mumbled, “My lines.”

She balled the parchment, watching the dismay leap into his face at all his work ruined. “You will do it again. Start from the beginning.”

The light of rebellion flashed briefly in his eyes, something she’d been seeing more and more often as he approached the unruly years of exploration and discovery. But it quickly flickered out, and he bowed his head with a sullen, “Yes, Mother.”

She was tempted to scold him for his tone, but decided she would ignore it for now. She was too tired for yet another lecture that flirted with the lines of battle. Glorfindel used to be such a delightful child: tender-hearted with scarcely an unkind word to be heard from his lips. He’d been as summer rain. Now she’d begun dreading the day he would test the limits of her power, and fight for control. She could sympathize with Fingolfin; she didn’t think she could have raised such a spirited child as Aredhel. 

When Fingolfin came to collect his grandson later, she would put her foot down on the boys studying together from now on. It had been Fingolfin’s idea and she’d been willing to attempted it, but Glorfindel was obviously too easily distracted by his cousin’s presence.

Impatient knocking drew her attention, and she went to answer the door with one last sharp command for the boys to study. She swung it open to reveal Aredhel. Aredhel smiled like a cat, just the corner of her mouth lifting, and slipped around her into the receiving room of Irimë’s chambers without awaiting an invitation. 

Aredhel plopped down on one of the low couches and spread her arms like fans across its back. “Well, Aunt?” she tossed her crow-black hair behind her. “Aren’t you going to sit down and gossip with your favorite niece?” Aredhel’s grey, heavily lidded eyes smirked from where she sprawled like a great feline. 

“How could I refuse such an offer?” Irimë smiled and settled elegant as a swan across from Aredhel who’d propped her booted feet up on the center table. Irimë favored her nice with a pointed look at her utter lack of decorum. The younger woman rolled her eyes, but removed her dirty boots from the table.

“If I were a man I could place my feet wherever I liked,” Aredhel scowled. “Celegorm puts his boots on the table even when they are covered in mud and who knows what else after days hunting in the wilds.”

“You are a lady, and as unfair as it may be, we must always act as our station as princesses of the Noldor dictates,” Irimë answered primly, secretly pleased Aredhel had been the one to offer her an opening on her cousin-lover. “Your father tells me you are quite fond of Celegorm.”

Aredhel slanted her a look. “Don’t play coy. If you want to know if I am bedding him than ask. I cannot stand all this dancing about. It is what I hate about court, everyone is so sickeningly false. They smile at you and flattery falls like gold from their tongues, but you know the moment your back it turned they will slander you the first chance they get.”

“That is depressingly morose, Aredhel.”

“It is true. And I will say so to whoever asks. I told Father I do not want to go to those tedious feasts because people look at me like they want to stab my eyes out.”

Irimë swallowed back a shard of irritation. She enjoyed Aredhel’s company, but the girl was wholly lacking in tact and divorced from conventional behavior. “Then I will be blunt: have you taken Celegorm Fëanorion as your lover?” 

“Yes,” Aredhel said with a lazy smile, tipping the fruit bowl on the low table towards her, and snapping off a handful of grapes from the vine.

“And what do you intend to do?” Irimë asked as Aredhel popped one of the large, red-skinned grapes into her mouth, cheeks puffing out like a chipmunk hording a nut.

“Do?” Aredhel asked around the fruit.

“Yes, do. You are a smart girl; you know what happens to women who take a lover without the utmost discretion, especially before marriage. Will you and Celegorm be announcing intentions of marrying? The blood between you is close, but I believe objections can be overcome given—” 

Irimë’s supportive speech cut off by Aredhel’s laughter. Irimë was more than a bit miffed at the disrespect. She’d been prepared to offer her wholehearted support to a union between Aredhel and Celegorm, and spin iron-clad plans with her niece as they plotted how to back opponents to the match into a corner and triumph with the spear of Love-Conquers-All in their hands.

“I am not marrying Celegorm!” Aredhel chortled. She gave Irimë a sly look, “The sex is fantastic though.”

It seemed Irimë’s words to Fingolfin had been truer than she knew. This younger generation was far less constrained by the codes of morality and laws than hers had been.

“I was thinking of calling it off,” Aredhel continued breezily. “I would have before, but Father was being such an old prude about the whole thing, and I couldn’t just end it or Father would think he won. But Grandmother Indis was worse. I actually made her so angry one time when we were arguing over Celegorm, she threatened to send me to Vairë’s Handmaidens!” She shuddered. “Imagine, _me_ , trapped beneath those hideous grey veils, walking in solemn procession at the Valar’s heels, my cunt withered and dried up from years of celibacy. I hear the Handmaidens are forbidden even self-pleasure!”

“Aredhel!” Irimë cried. The absence of quill scratching snapped her head around to find two sets of wide blue eyes watching Aredhel and her with avid attention. “The children…” she said weakly as the conversation rewound in her head, snagging on all the inappropriate topics her son and Guilin overheard.

Aredhel craned her neck to see the boys sitting at their table across the room. “Is that my cousin? I have not seen him since he was a baby. And there is my favorite nephew! Come over and give me a kiss, Guilin!” She did not show the least embarrassed at discovering the eavesdroppers.

Guilin bounced right up, and ran over to his aunt. She scooped him into her arms, plopping him in her lap and proceeded to tickle him breathless and begging. “Aunty Aredhel, please, please! I can’t breathe!”

Aredhel smacked him lightly on his bottom. “Don’t call me aunty! It makes me feel old!” The child giggled and promised in-between breaths never to use the dreaded name for Aredhel again.

Aredhel set Guilin back on his feet, and turned to Glorfindel who was hanging back, a shy, longing look on his face as he watched the two play. “My, my, you have grown into quite a handsome young man. You will drive all the girls wild in a few years. Come over here. I am going to steal your first kiss and brag about it for years to come. It will drive the other girls mad with jealousy.”

Glorfindel took a few hesitant steps, unsure what to think of this loud, rambunctious stranger, but Guilin darted forward to grab his hand and hauled him over to the grinning Aredhel. Without further delay, Aredhel laid her hands on Glorfindel’s shoulders to draw the boy closer and smacked him loudly with a kiss on the cheek. 

Glorfindel rubbed the wetness off his face with a disgusted look as Irimë hustled the boys back to their studies. She covered up her discomfort over what the boys had overheard with a stern scolding on allowing themselves to be distracted.

But when Irimë returned to her seat opposite Aredhel, her niece, who didn’t appear to have a shred of propriety or shame, launched right back into her woes against her father who was apparently a stuffy bore, and Turgon who had the nerve to take her aside to express his ‘concern.’ 

“It can hardly come as a surprise,” Irimë interjected. “Men love to employ double-standards. Think of Guilin’s—” She broke off, acutely away of the child’s presence in the room, and not wishing to distress him by speaking of his mother. “Well...you know. And Fingon did not get even a slap on the wrist.”

“Our mother slapped him all right,” Aredhel said with relish, “hard enough his cheek went pink. And Father and Turgon gave him _such_ a tongue lashing….” She trailed off with dreamy eyes, before sobering. “But it was nothing to mine, of course. I thought at least Turgon would stand up for me!”

“Turgon, not Fingon?” Irimë frowned, thinking it more logical Fingon would join his sister’s side since he himself had been guilty of the same crimes.

“Fingon would never disagree with Father. He likes to play at rebellious child, but when any real ‘crisis’ threatens the family, Fingon is there at Father’s right hand. Well, unless it involves Maedhros whom he adores more than Turgon and I combined,” she ended with a bitter twist to her mouth. 

“I am sure that is not true,” Irimë tried to console, though she had no real idea since most of her nephews and nieces were little more than strangers to her.

Aredhel’s mouth pursed and she tossed her head like an agitated stallion. “It is not like I really care what that prat does or who he loves,” she denied, though it was an obvious lie. “Besides, all these endless arguments are getting old, and Celegorm’s becoming so possessive. I cannot help it if other men flirt with me, and really what is the harm? It is not like Celegorm and I are getting married; though to hear him talk you would think we already were! It is best to put an end to the affair now, before he turns into an absolute beast and ruins all the fun.”

Irimë’s belly rolled in alarm. “One does not play lightly with a Fëanorion’s heart. From all I have heard, I would say he is in love with you.”

“Oh nonsense. Celegorm could never love a woman. He is too in love with his dogs.” Her eyebrows wiggled suggestively, and Irimë’s stomach turned at the insinuation. “And his brothers,” Aredhel added with a smirk. “That is the way of those Fëanorion men. They love each other more than they will ever love a woman.”

Irimë’s mouth pinched, knowing how true those words proved for Maglor. But she said, “That is what they think now, but wait until we aren’t there to hold their hands and wipe up their messes, and they will miss us, you can be sure.” 

“They seem to have got on well enough without their mother,” Aredhel shot Irimë’s theory and private hope down.

Irimë had no way of knowing if this statement was false or not. Maglor never spoke of Nerdanel who had left her sons and husband to return to her father’s house while Amrod and Amras were younger even than Guilin. She’d know of Nerdanel’s leaving; she doubted there was anyone in Valinor who didn’t know Fëanor’s wife had left him. There had been rumors about the heated and frequent arguments the two shared for years beforehand, but still, the reality of a wife leaving her husband and young children was shocking.

Their conversation was interrupted by another knock on her door. Irimë was still asking who that could be when Aredhel flung the door open. Fingon leaned indolently against the doorway, greeting his sister with a lazy smile. Maedhros Fëanorion stood at his shoulder. If the tall, copper-haired man had been anyone else, Irimë would have said he walked in his cousin’s shadow, but Maedhros’ presence was too commanding to be anyone’s shadow.

Fingon sauntered into the room, walking like he owned the world and couldn’t be bothered to care. Maedhros trailed him, his fine-boned, stunningly sculpted face aloof, and his eyes cool and assessing.

“Sister,” Fingon nodded at Aredhel, before taking Irimë’s offered hand and bowing over it with inborn grace, “Lady.” When he favored her with a boyishly charming smile, she understood why he had no trouble finding women to fill his bed.

“Well, aren’t you popular, Aunt,” Aredhel said as she tossed herself back on the couch, not bothering with formalities.

The Trees’ lights had been waning by the time Irimë rode into Tirion yesterday with Glorfindel on his bedecked pony at her side. Her father and mother turned out to greet them, with a collection of their large family. It had been a whirlwind of kisses, her mother’s happy tears, formal reunions between near-strangers, and warm embraces between those she’d lost touch with during her long exile upon the Holy Mountain. But there had been no time for long chats, just a simple hot meal to fill their bellies, before she tucked her son, whose eyes drooped over his stew, into bed. 

She spoke briefly with Fingolfin this morning when he’d dropped off Guilin, before matters of state swept him away. She hadn’t failed to notice the coolness towards her he nurtured since his visit some weeks earlier. It fell brutal as a slap upon the joy of her homecoming.

The memory of Fingolfin’s unforgiving presence fueled her to goad, “Fingolfin brought your son to see mine on Taniquetil, did you know? From the way Guilin responded to Fingolfin, I would have thought him his father.”

Fingon’s face chilled and Aredhel went still on the couch. Then Fingon smiled, but it did not reach his eyes as he said with a careless shrug, “Why deny my father Guilin’s company when it brings him such joy?”

Irimë couldn’t stop herself from needling, even though she was the one who’d started this: “Fingolfin cares a great deal for Guilin, like his own son. One would hope you would love the child as he deserves, despite his origins.”

Fingon’s jaw clenched, eyes heating. “If I needed your _advice_ on the raising of my own son I’d _ask_ for it.”

“But apparently you need lessons on honorable behavior. Or how have you justified you treatment of his mother? You abandoned her after you finished with your pleasure, and you would have done the same to Guilin if Fingolfin had not forced you to own your responsibilities!”

“You have never met the woman! So don’t try to shoulder your way into affairs you know nothing of!”

“I would not have to if you hadn’t acted like a scoundrel!” Irimë had not realized how angry she was over Fingon’s callous treatment of his son’s mother until she’d seen him, but now she burned with righteous anger. How dare he stand there, unrepentant, saying he’d done nothing wrong?

Fingon’s looked furious. A quiver of pleasure and triumph that she could rile him so, stroked down her spine. He was as hot-blooded as his sister. 

But then Maedhros took Fingon’s elbow, calming him with no more than a touch. Irimë found herself caught in the silver-bright eyes of a predator, fierce and assessing. They ran over her, picking her apart, measuring her worth. She knew she’d failed every test by the easy contempt in their depths. 

She felt stripped naked under Maedhros’ gaze. Dislike and envy curled about her heart. Maedhros possessed what she most craved: Maglor’s unshakable, absolute love. 

Not only did he hold a higher place in her lover’s heart than she, but the man was frighteningly self-assured and self-possessed. There was a clear, intimidating intelligence in his eyes, and an untouchable beauty in his face that seeped jealously in her veins. She could scream and rail insults and cunningly shaped dagger-words at him, and cause him no more distress than a pesky fly.

But she couldn’t stop herself from trying, and said with all the subtly of a yowling she-cat, “I have not had the pleasure of greeting my half-brother’s sons. Tell me, how is your dear mother these days?”

Maedhros raised a sculpted, elegant brow and said without a hint of inflection, “My mother is well. I am sure she shall regret not greeting your arrival, lady. I would have sent word to her, but was not aware you had ever shared acquaintance.”

Irimë flushed under the neat barb turned effortless back at her. He’d pointed out the foolishness of her inquiry, and her poorly performed duty as Finwë’s daughter when she never welcomed Nerdanel into the family. Irimë, and Indis with her, held no affection for Fëanor, and thus had made no effort to include Fëanor’s wife in their confidence and home.

Irimë was spared a flimsy retort, when Guilin’s tiny figure scampered passed like a rabbit and darted to his father’s side. Unlike with Fingolfin, the child did not immediately fling himself upon his father, but slipped his hand into Fingon’s larger one and said with all the solemnity of children, “Don’t be mad, Daddy.”

The storm built on Fingon’s face lifted in the face of his son’s innocence. “Where have you been hiding, cub?” He cupped the little hand in his.

The child had captured the attention of the whole room, and shyly buried his head in his father’s leggings, mumbling: “Playing with Glorfindel.”

Fingon’s blue eyes, the mirror of his father’s, darted up to find his son’s playmate. Glorfindel had emerged from their workspace, but hadn’t quite dared to approach the cluster of strange men. He hung back, half-hidden behind the couches.

“Well, you are coming with me, brat,” Fingon said with affection, hoisting his son onto his hip. He shot Irimë a scathing look. “You may tell my father my son is with me.”

“Can Glorfindel come?” Guilin asked, turning pleading eyes upon his father. “He’s my bestest friend in the world!”

“That sounds like a brilliant idea,” Aredhel answered for Irimë, shooting her aunt a loaded look, “Irimë and I have some things to discuss in private.”

Irimë refused to buckle under her niece’s glare. She knew perfectly well that she’d been argumentative and snappish to Fingon…and Maedhros, but she would not apologize for calling Fingon out on his dishonorable conduct. 

“Where are you taking Guilin?” Irimë demanded, refusing to be backed into a corner or agree to anything without all the facts. Glorfindel was _her_ child.

“To see his cousin Celebrimbor,” Fingon said with a challenging look, daring her to snub the outing now she knew the goal was Fëanor’s grandson.

Irimë’s lip curled. Curufin’s son, her hated half-brother’s grandson. She was loathed to put Glorfindel under Fëanor’s sphere of influence no matter how small the shadow. But… she had been inexcusably rude, and while she’d never bend her proud neck to actually apologize to Fingon –less Maedhros even if he had done nothing more felonious than have a greater portion of Maglor’s heart—she was not blind to her error. 

So she conceded, using Glorfindel’s company as an olive branch. “Very well. My son has permission to accompany you, but I want him back in time for dinner.” She beckoned her son forward, “Glorfindel come here.” He obeyed like the good son he was (in almost all things but the most grievous). She straightened his tunic and combed his messy hair back from his face, “You be good. I do not want you coming home dirty. Your grandfather and grandmother want to meet you properly tonight. I expect you to be well-behaved and polite, and remember what we have talked about, understood?”

Glorfindel nodded meekly at the reminder of his deficiency.

“Dear gods, woman!” Fingon cried. “You would think he was going to a funeral!”

“And what would you know about funerals?” Irimë snipped back.

“I have buried a dead pet a time or two in my life.” Fingon said so seriously, she might have thought him still mourning for a lost and dearly loved rabbit if she hadn’t caught the wink he slipped his son who’d wound his hands about his father’s neck. Guilin muffled a giggle in his father’s hair.

“Come on you two. We’re off to have an adventure.” Fingon jogged to the door, Guilin bouncing on his hip and squealing with delight. 

The eldest son of Fëanor followed Fingon’s energized form from the room with only one last parting glance at Irimë that knotted her stomach even as it chilled her bones with its frostiness. Fingon seemed to have mostly forgiven her attack, as quickly angered as he was to cool, but Maedhros had not forgotten. His eyes held all the frigidness of a mountain glacier, and its relentless, inescapable intent.


	5. Chapter 5

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 5

The man tossed Guilin into the air. The child screamed with laughter as he flew. The man caught Guilin and kissed his laughing face. The man’s name was Fingon, and he was Guilin’s father. Glorfindel had thought Uncle Fingolfin was Guilin’s father before today. 

There were so many cousins and uncles and grandparents that his head spun and kept getting them mixed up. Things had been much simpler on the mountain, but it had been lonely too. There was no one to play with, and something terrible was happening to him, something dirty, though he tried and tried to do as his mother said and banish the bad thoughts. But sometimes they came in dreams, and how could he stop dreams?

Fingon set Guilin on the ground with a light swat on his bottom and told him to run ahead with Glorfindel. Glorfindel allowed Guilin to grab his hand and pull him away. Guilin’s shorter legs pumped as he darted ahead, eager to be the leader. But Glorfindel’s attention was still riveted on the two men, both of them cousins he’d not known he’d had before today. 

Guilin’s father was talking to the red-haired one. Glorfindel had never seen red hair before; everyone on the mountain had yellow hair like him and his mother and father. But Cousin Maglor and Uncle Fingolfin had hair so black it shone like jet in Laurelin’s light.

“…insufferable woman,” Guilin’s father was saying, and his mouth twisted like he’d just bitten into a lemon. Glorfindel thought it made him look funny, but he bit his lip to keep from laughing and tightened his fingers around Guilin’s hand. He’d learned how to stop up his laughter when his father was laboring at his desk, a mountain of scrolls and missives about him. 

His father didn’t like begin disturbed by Glorfindel’s play, so if Glorfindel wanted the privilege of playing in his father’s study he had to be quiet as a mouse. He had trained himself how to be quiet because he loved sitting in his father’s study with him. It made him feel grown-up and smelt good, like pines and old tomes and that fairy scent that clung to his father that Father said, reverently, was the presence of Lord Manwë and the Queen of the Stars.

Guilin swung their joined hands in high arcs. He broke into a skip that slapped loudly on the stone slabs of the floor. Glorfindel wanted to hear what the grown-ups were saying though, so he let Guilin’s hand go and drug his feet until he’d fallen back far enough to hear the deep voices.

“…believe her nerve? She has no idea what Guilin’s mother was like. That woman was the most self-centered creature I have ever had the misfortune to meet.”

There was a pause, and Glorfindel chanced a glance back at the two towering men. The red-headed one was giving Fingon a look, the kind that weighted like gold between adults, but Glorfindel couldn’t quite figure out yet. It seemed Fingon couldn’t figure it out either because he snapped, “What?”

Maedhros did not say whatever he was thinking though. Fingon grabbed his tunic, fisting it and jerking Maedhros’ taller body towards him. “If you have something to say, then say it. I cannot stand anymore of this!”

Maedhros brushed Fingon off, straightening out his rumbled tunic with a few neat, economical movements, as if he didn’t want to waste his fingers’ time with flashy gestures. Then he pinned Fingon with eyes sharp as starlight that made Glorfindel want to duck away even though they weren’t focused on him. 

Fingon didn’t look away, but tilted his chin up as if to embrace the intensity of that look and the words that came on its tail. Glorfindel thought Guilin’s father very brave. “You act more like a favorite uncle than a father, and leave your father to raise your son.”

Fingon didn’t flitch from the harsh criticism, holding Maedhros’ gaze. But then he turned away. His shoulders still wore a proud line, but his voice dropped, “I don’t know how to be a father. I had not planned on being one, and certainly not without a wife.”

Maedhros didn’t relent. He placed a finely shaped hand on Fingon’s shoulder and turned him back around. “And when it happens again?”

Fingon did bristle at this accusation. “I am not such a whore that I would risk this debacle again. I will not bed another woman like Guilin’s mother, of that you can be sure.”

Maedhros shook his head, releasing him. “And you think that is enough?”

Fingon’s jaw clenched. “I have not bedded even _one_ woman since I learned Guilin was mine. None, Maedhros!” Maedhros began striding down the corridor again without replying, and Fingon murmured, “We can’t all be perfect.”

All expression wiped off Maedhros’ face. “Don’t,” his voice scraped low and coiled, so much packed into that one word, so much repressed.

Fingon raised his hands in a placatory manner. “You are right. I should not have. Forgive me.” He sighed, shoulders slumping and every scrap of carelessness sliding from his face. He caught at Maedhros’ sleeve. “It seems all our meetings end in anger. We promised we would not let our fathers’ feud come between us, but it has, hasn’t? You are so reserved now. I barely know what you are thinking anymore. We promised—”

“It is not as simple as that.” Maedhros turned his face away.

“Why can’t it be?” Fingon turned his body to follow Maedhros’ retreating eyes, catching them with his own. “Why can’t we be anything we want? Why can’t we go back to the way it was?”

Glorfindel nearly walked smack into the wall as the corridor branched, and he had to take his eyes off his two cousins to keep from getting a bloodied noise. Guilin circled back around. He’d stopped skipping and started chanting a baby rhyme in a sing-song voice. Glorfindel didn’t know which corridor to choose, so he waited with Guilin until the two men caught up.

Fingon ruffled his son’s hair until it was a fuzzy mess. The two braids sweeping the hair out of the boy’s face were hopelessly frayed. “You want to see your grandpa, cub?”

“We get to see Cousin Cel’brim’or!” 

Fingon grimaced. “Not today. He is probably down at the forge with his father, and that is a meeting I could live without.”

“But you promised!” It was more the idea of a missed adventure that Guilin mourned than cousins he hardly knew.

“Well I was angry at the time. Let this be a lesson to you: Don’t ever promise anything in anger. In fact it is best if you don’t talk at all when you are angry.” Guilin didn’t look appeased by the lecture, but Fingon scooped him up. “It is off to your grandpa with you.”

“What about Irimë’s son?” Maedhros looked pointedly at Glorfindel.

Fingon hesitated, and shot Maedhros a pleading look. “Could you take him to the forges? I would rather Irimë didn’t know I had been…”

“Lying,” Maedhros’ mouth twitched.

“Stretching the truth,” Fingon winked. “And Celebrimbor could use some time away from the forge. It will be good for him. Think of it as a family outing, you being the upstanding uncle that you are.” Fingon grinned wickedly.

The look Maedhros sent him was unimpressed, but Fingon kept grinning like a deer staring down a ravenous wolf. And somehow, unbelievable, the deer won. Maedhros’ mouth slipped into a smile more enthralling than a breathless Mingling of the Tree Light. “Have it your way.”

“Excellent!” Fingon started down the corridor with a bounce in his step. 

Maedhros followed, and Glorfindel trailed behind, last in their procession. Glorfindel had almost spoken up to say they didn’t have to worry about him, he didn’t want to be a burden, but then remembered that his cousin Aredhel had said she wanted to speak with his mother privately, and what was Glorfindel supposed to do while they were talking, maybe for hours? If he were home, he’d have gone down to the stream to play, but he didn’t know where any streams where in this big city, and was sure to get lost before he even escaped the many halls of his grandfather’s palace.

Glorfindel gnawed his lower lip, debating if it was better to be an unwanted chore or bored and possibly lost. A hand brushed his shoulders, jerking him from his worries. Maedhros had dropped back to keep an easy pace beside Glorfindel, shortening his long, powerful strides to match his. 

“Celebrimbor is reserved and a bit older than you, but I believe you will get along. Once we tear him away from the forge that is, and that is quite a task in itself,” he added like a secret shared between friends.

Glorfindel smiled hesitantly up at his cousin who towered over him. He wondered if Maedhros was just trying to be nice and if it mattered either way. He didn’t have much practice with friends. Adults were more willing to talk with him than boys his own age. But adults, even if they pretended to be your friend, didn’t play with you like other boys did.

They hadn’t gone far before they stopped again, this time for Fingon and Maedhros to talk with two men coming down the corridor from the way they were headed. Fingon asked the men if they’d seen his father, Uncle Fingolfin.

“He is in a council meeting,” one of the men with the wild curls of the Vanyar answered. Then he raised his eyebrows at Maedhros. “I am surprised you are not there as well. You usually stand in for your father.”

“As Finrod does for yours,” Maedhros answered coolly.

The other man wore a crooked smile. “You know how the Fëanorions’ are, Angrod. They take everything as an insult.”

“Aegnor,” Fingon warned. 

Aegnor shot Maedhros a lazy-eyed smile that resembled a cat and said, “Maedhros won’t get twisted out of shape over a joke. Unlike some of his brothers, or father. There is no harm in a little teasing. When we have lost our humor, then they have won.”

“Who has won?” Maedhros arched a brow.

Aegnor waved a hand vaguely, “Them. Whoever. The ones who have stirred the dangerous waters of politics. Don’t play coy with me, you know to what I refer.”

Fingon groaned. “Can we go one day without talking about _that_? I am sure my father and our grandfather have been shut up for hours talking about nothing else. All anyone ever talks about now is Fëanor’s _blasphemy_ against the Valar, Fëanor’s hatred of my father, or the rumors of Fëanor’s intention to return to Endor, and these After Comers. I am thoroughly sick of it.”

“Not everyone talks about it, not everyone even knows about these rumors,” Aegnor’s brother corrected. “It is only here at court that the whispers fly.”

“Yes, whispers. All anyone ever does is whisper! But nobody actually _does_ anything!”

“I share your frustrations, Cousin,” Aegnor’s brother said, “But we seem to be the only ones who grow tired of words. The king calls council after council. And yet all their talk is a con to try and lull us into believing the king means to do _anything_ about the city’s unrest. He is content to let the fractions pull each other apart.”

Maedhros said, each word clear and precise as if he’d shaped them from diamonds, “Grandfather has ever been loath to speak out in opposition to higher powers,” he took a care not to name these higher powers in the public corridor, “ever he has kept his personal opinions close to his chest and played the role of mediator.” 

Aegnor scoffed. “Oh, ay, in _politics_ the king plays both sides like a fiddle –though the time to end the music and take a definite stand has long past—but Grandfather never bothered to hide where his personal _favorite_ lay among his children, did he?”

Maedhros held Aegnor’s gaze, and answered in a neutral voice, “Perhaps not.”

“There is no _perhaps_ about it—”

Fingon jumped in, “Alright, alright, let’s not ruin a perfectly good day.” He looked between them, “Let’s stop picking sides and just be cousins.”

Aegnor’s brother shot Fingon an incredulous look. “Too late for that, Fingon. Far, far too late.”

Fingon closed his eyes and let out a breath through his nose. He looked down at his son circling his waist with skinny legs. He said, sorrow and longing laced through his voice, “Angrod, remember that hunting trip Celegorm set up for us? You, Aredhel, and Celegorm kept leading poor Finrod into traps. You’d exchanged bets to see how filthy Finrod had to get before he lost his temper and started yelling. You and Celegorm ended up tying, and he proposed you settled the tie with a wrestling match. He won.”

“You can’t turn back time, Fingon,” Angrod sighed. “Stop blinding yourself to reality. Lines have been drawn. Sides have to be chosen. Whether we want to or not. If you keep living in the past you’ll end up like the king.”

“No,” Maedhros said, “Grandfather does not stand up for what his heart tells him to be right because he is afraid. Fingon refuses to be forced into choosing a side because he believes that _choosing_ is wrong. And Fingon always does what he believes is right.” Fingon flushed under the intense way Maedhros looked at him, before Maedhros’ eyes flickered away.

Angrod disagreed, though took no pleasure in it, “Fingon hasn’t choose side because _you_ do not make him choose between you and his father. Yet.” 

Fingon straightened up. “Maedhros would never make me choose.”

“Circumstances will, because Maedhros is hardly going to choose any side but his father and brothers,’ is he?”

Fingon looked disturbed, and Maedhros’ face blanked. Guilin chose that moment to make his need for a caretaker known again, “Are we going to Grandpa now, Daddy?”

Fingon bounced his son, smiling at him, but the smile was strained. “Grandpa’s busy, cub.”

Guilin’s little nose scrunched up in thought, “Cousin Idril?”

“Sorry, kiddo, no Idril today. Your uncle Turgon is busy sticking his nose in other people’s business.” At Angrod’s questioning look, Fingon explained, “Turgon is on his self-righteous podium again and won’t let Elenwë watch Guilin, never mind that it is hardly any bother since she already has Idril.” 

“Why doesn’t Turgon want Elenwë to mind him?” Angrod asked.

“Turgon says I don’t spend enough time with my son.” At Angrod’s raised brow Fingon snarled, “Don’t you start too!”

“Did I say anything?” 

“You didn’t need to. His guilty conscious took care of it,” Aegnor’s flashed Fingon a grin. “Why can’t you watch your son, Fingon?” 

Fingon looked uncomfortably down at Guilin. “Can we find something for you to do while Grandpa is in a meeting?” 

“We can play turnip-head!” Guilin cried, vibrating with excitement at the thought of getting a whole afternoon with his father.

Fingon face looked pained. “Turnip—No, I don’t want to know.”

“You could teach him chess,” Angrod suggested with a dubious look at Guilin’s small body, “Though he may be a bit young yet.”

Fingon sighed. “I suppose we will find something.”

“You have to start somewhere, Fingon,” Angrod said. “Nobody knows how to be a father the moment their child is born. It takes practice.”

“Why, brother,” Aegnor smirked. “You might just make a decent father yet.”

“You will make a terrible uncle,” Angrod quipped back.

Fingon rolled his eyes and chanced another glance down at Glorfindel’s silent form. “Celebrimbor?” he asked Maedhros, needing no more than one word to convey his meaning.

“As promised.”

Fingon flashed Maedhros a smile. “Have fun,” he tossed over his shoulder as he strolled away, Guilin a bubbly weight on his hip.

“He has changed since this business with his son started. He has not made a single woman cry of a broken heart in months. He didn’t even flirt with Marissámo at the banquet last week, and she was one of his usuals,” Angrod said as he watched Fingon disappear around a corner. “I have not decided yet if it is a change for the better. He has grown so prickly.”

“Give him time,” Aegnor said, “Fatherhood fell on him like a party crasher.”

“No one’s fault but his own,” Angrod dismissed. “He should stop running away from his responsibilities. He bedded the girl. Now he has to deal with the consequences.” 

“Maybe Maedhros has the right way of it. See any pretty men lately Fingon could pretend were women in the dark?” 

“Quite,” Maedhros hissed, hand chopping the air as he darted a glance down the corridor. 

“You are as prickly as Fingon now days,” Angrod tisked. “What is wrong with everyone in this city?”

“Lower your voices. It is not your life that will be ruined if we are overheard,” Maedhros’ eyes flicking down to Glorfindel’s watching ones.

Aegnor scanned Maedhros’ tense face. He said, voice stripped of the undercurrent of antagonism that had ridden under most of his words to Maedhros, “I don’t like the way your father treats my father. I don’t like the way some of your brothers look down on my family because of a grandmother we hardly know. But we would be the worst sort of snitches to go running to the Valar about your preferences. We have never told a soul, and we never will.”

“I want to know how _you_ two know, and if anyone else does,” Maedhros ground out through clenched teeth.

“You told us yourself,” Angrod said. “Or rather, you and Fingolfin were speaking rather bluntly in Fingolfin’s family wing and we happened by.”

“Lucky for you it was us and not Fingon, eh? That is who you really want to know by ‘anyone one else.’” Aegnor crossed his arms over his chest. “He doesn’t. Not that we are aware, unless you have come to your senses and told him yourself.”

Maedhros’ mouth pursed. “It is not that simple. And if either of you say anything to him I will not need a blade to destroy you.”

Angrod huffed. “There is no need to be a brut about it.”

“He is a Fëanorion,” Aegnor said. “They don’t do things in half measures.” But he gave Maedhros his word, “We swear not to tell anyone, and that includes Fingon. Though Light knows why you don’t just tell him.”

“What I tell or don’t tell Fingon is my business,” Maedhros said, hard and uncompromising. 

Aegnor lifted a brow back, “And whose indiscretion was it that let Fingolfin into your deep, dark secret to begin with?”

Maedhros waved the words away, “That was a long time ago. I was young and unpracticed in caution.”

“How about a bet,” Angrod said. “Ten gold pieces Fingon gets his head out his ass and realizes Maedhros wants to replace it with—” 

“Enough,” Maedhros’ voice chopped rough as sandpaper, thrust through a tight throat as his eyes scanned the open spaces of the corridors as if a monster might jump out at them. 

The tension rolling off Maedhros frightened Glorfindel. Maybe it scared the adults too, because their conversation trialed off as if they wished to be free of the corridor quickly. Maedhros placed a hand on Glorfindel’s shoulders and steered him down the corridor, and onto the mysterious Fëanorions and their smithies.

*

When Maedhros had led Glorfindel through the many crisscrossing halls of the palace, they came through the great doors of cedar banded with mithril and gold that stood like sentries before the palace steps. Beyond these lay the Great Square paved in white stones and packed at Laurelin’s high-noon. Elves, their heads crowned with high-plumed helms, sat upon bedecked steeds and cut through the masses like water splitting before a rock. Litters sheltering great ladies were carried by servants who marched through the heart of the square, the bustling crowds parting before their shouts.

People stopped to stare at Maedhros. He gave them a handsome, but remote, smile as mummers of ‘Price Maedhros’ and ‘King Finwë’s grandson’ rippled through the square. Maedhros pulled Glorfindel after him as he wrestled through the throng of market-goers, idlers, and tradesmen. 

Many tried to touch Maedhros, his hand, his arm. To these, Maedhros’ cultured voice dolling out ‘excuse me’s,’ wore the edge of annoyance. The tightness in the hand encircling Glorfindel’s arm, and the stiffness in Maedhros’ stride, cautioned Glorfindel to silence and hast. But others in the crowd kept their hands to themselves, giving Maedhros polite greetings; to these Maedhros’ smile deepening into genuine lines. 

As they pushed deeper into the square, Elves hailed Maedhros by name, and he paused to clasp hands with a stone mason, carpenter, and the troop of musicians set up and performing in the square’s open center. He asked after a cobbler’s baby girl, an apple farmer’s yield, and a tutor’s charges.

Maedhros took Glorfindel down one of the cleanly cut side streets that bisected the Great Square in crisp parallels. The Noldor were lovers of order, and their city reflected this. The Great Square was indeed a square, with four perfectly even sides, the two main city thoroughfares meeting in its center at a crossroads. All lesser streets branched out from the square’s expanse in a precisely measured grid. There were no curved, meandering streets in Tirion, no alleyways where the light of the Two Trees did not reach, nor gutters of filth, for a complex sewage system had been laid down like a woven basket before the first cornerstone of marble had been positioned.

The press of the gawkers did not ease, only grew poorer the further they ventured from the main thoroughfares. The common folk –baskets upon their hips, children clinging to skirts, puling carts with hands rough as tree roots—paused to stare at the prince come down into their midst. 

Maedhros tugged Glorfindel on, down another street, and into a drinking den. The smell of spilt wine and the clamor of voices inflated by spirits assaulted Glorfindel. No one paid them much mind here, even with their fine clothes. Maedhros steered him to a darkly lit booth, and anticipated the tavern-maid who’d started sauntering over, with a brisk order of wine and milk.

Glorfindel grimaced, knowing he’d be served milk like a baby, but he was too overwhelmed and unsure in the alien setting to protest. They sat in silence. Glorfindel carved crescents into the table’s wood with his fingernails as they awaited the maid’s return. When she’d slapped down a cup of wine and mug of milk, Maedhros tossed a gold piece at her, telling her to keep it and make sure they weren’t disturbed. 

With the girl gone, Maedhros took a slow sip of his wine, watching Glorfindel over the rim of his goblet with eyes that put Glorfindel in mind of a panther. He shivered, and clenched nervous fingers about his chilled mug, though he did not drink.

“Glorfindel,” Maedhros said his name slowly, rolling each syllable over his tongue like an experimental drink. He twirled his wine goblet with a finely shaped hand as he studied Glorfindel with predatory eyes. “It is unfortunate you overheard Angrod and Aegnor’s careless talk.” Glorfindel wet his lips, belly flopping at the reminder of the confusing conversation. 

“You are a smart boy. Why don’t you tell me what you think they were talking about and I can answer any questions you might have. I am sure it can be confusing, even frightening, but there is no need to be scared. It is just you and me, your cousin Maedhros.”

Glorfindel swallowed thickly, and now he did take a gulp of the milk to moisten a mouth that seemed unnaturally dry. He wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand, before answering hesitantly, “I didn’t hear anything—I mean, it didn’t make sense.”

Maedhros smiled at him, but it was the kind of smile someone gives their foe, or a person they are forced to endure. It didn’t reach Maedhros’ eyes. “Tell me what confused you, and I will be happy to explain it.”

Except Glorfindel didn’t think Maedhros would be happy at all. He hadn’t forgotten the way Maedhros had threatened the two brothers. Glorfindel wondered if he would be like this man one day if he didn’t purge his dirtiness. Would he have a tongue like a blade, and eyes that looked like they could eat you up? 

Glorfindel had lied when he said he didn’t understand what Angrod and Aegnor were talking about. He might not have if his mother hadn’t been laboring to cure him of the very same wickedness that now had a hold on his cousin Maedhros. Maybe he should try to help Maedhros as his mother had helped him? Maedhros might get angry…but they were family after all, and families were supposed to help each other.

“I know what they meant,” Glorfindel confessed softly. “My mother told me about it. You like to look at other men in bad ways. I do too. But she says if I try really hard I can stop. Only,” he bit his lip, dropping his eyes to the table, “sometimes I have dreams about…kissing a boy. But boys don’t kiss. It is dirty. That is what my mother said. She says I can stop having bad thoughts, but I have tried and they just keep coming!” He finished in despair. 

His lip trembled, but he bit it savagely and refused to cry. Not here. Not in front of this tall, blazing, frightening man. His fingers clenched so hard they hurt under the table, but he would not cry!

“Glorfindel,” Glorfindel couldn’t help snapping his eyes up at the way Maedhros said his name: tender, like the caress of his favorite mountain brook over its smooth pebbled bottom. Maedhros’ face was different now. He smiled with his eyes, and Glorfindel wasn’t afraid anymore. “I dream about kissing boys too. It is not bad or dirty. It is wonderful and makes us very special.”

Glorfindel shook his head wildly, “No! That is not what my mother said.”

“You mother is wrong.” Maedhros words were so calm and matter-of-fact that Glorfindel couldn’t help believing for a moment. Surely this man who seemed so wise and powerful couldn’t want to do dirty things? But he wavered, the hope leaching out of his eyes. His mother had been so sure it was bad to like other boys. They couldn’t both be right.

“Do you know who created the Elves, Glorfindel?” Maedhros asked in his steady, tranquil voice.

“Lord Manwë?” Glorfindel asked, biting his lip. His mother had taught him many things –sums, the Tengwar, and the history of their people and their Great Journey from the East— but not about this. His mother didn’t talk about the Valar, and his father was too busy with his scrolls to teach his son.

“It was Eru Ilúvatar. He created all the Elves, even the ones who did not take the Great Journey, but stayed beneath the stars in the wild lands of Endor. Eru called us his children, his greatest and most precious work. It was he who formed our bodies, like a potter sculpts clay, and he who gave us the delights of the flesh that lets us experience the greatest pleasure on Arda. He gave us these bodies. Bodies that sing like the stars when touched sweetly, and bodies that dream about kissing boys.”

Glorfindel stared at Maedhros opened-mouthed as the man spun words like gold. “So,” his thoughts tumbled over each other like a mudslide, “it is all right to kiss boys?”

“It is more than all right. It is beautiful,” Maedhros promised. “Eru gave us bodies to enjoy, and souls to love. One day you will find the person your soul will marry, and what matters is not the shape of their body, but the color of their soul. It is their soul you will fall in love with.”

A blush blossomed on Glorfindel’s cheeks at the thought of marrying anyone, but a bubble of giddiness filled him at Maedhros’ words. He wasn’t dirty. There wasn’t something foul and twisted inside him. He didn’t have to be afraid to sleep and dream, because boys could kiss. But there was still a grain of worry and confusion tying him down, “But why did my mother lie?”

“Most people are blind. They cannot see the beauty of Ilúvatar’s masterpiece. They want everyone to look the same way they do, even though if everyone looked the same it would be like a weaver who wove a tapestry with only one color of thread. But because they are blind, we can never tell them about our beauty. We must keep it locked in our hearts, sealed behind our lips. You must never tell anyone, but perhaps your closest and most trusted friends, of your desires.”

“But why?” 

“Because people cannot see the truth, and they will try to hurt you out of fear.”

“Fear of what?”

“Of something powerful, something they do not understand and have hardened their hearts against.” Maedhros’ voice rolled deep and sorrowful as a forest pool whose waters delved so far into the Earth they turned black and smooth as stones.

“So…we have to keep it a secret?” Glorfindel asked morosely.

“Yes. For now.” 

“All right,” Glorfindel agreed with little enthusiasm. 

Maedhros watched him another moment with those eyes that seemed to pick him apart and see into the crevices of his mind, before he brushed a lose fall of copper waves over his shoulder and said, “Come on then, I will take you to meet Celebrimbor.” Glorfindel slid gratefully out of the seat, leaving his milk unfinished, and eagerly followed Maedhros from the tavern.


	6. Chapter 6

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 6

It was a long walk to the city gates, but Glorfindel was thankful for the fresh breeze on the other side. Trion’s high walls inhibited the wild winds that wanted to race free and chaotic as a stallion through the Calacirya, which ran like an artery through the Pelóri Mountain’s long arms. As they descended the crystal steps cut into the side of Mount Túna, Glorfindel was awed afresh by the city’s majesty. It was as much a work of art as the gems and sculptures the Noldor were famous for.

As they walked, he asked Maedhros why the Fëanorions’ forges were so secluded from the many others that inhabited the city. Maedhros gave him a smile he couldn’t unravel, and told him his father liked privacy for his work.

The Fëanorions’ smithies were built along the base of the mount. It was a sizable operation with a cluster of forges bellowing smoke black as sin, and emitting the clanging sound of metal upon metal. There were buildings set aside for cooking, and tables scattered in the open field before the forges’ doors where Elves bustled even now, clearing away the remnants of the noonday meal. 

Maedhros led Glorfindel to the largest smithy, only pausing briefly to accept and return the greetings these sweaty, leather-apron wearing folk called out. Glorfindel slipped behind him into the low-beamed building, and was hit by a wave of heat. He smelt iron and fire and sweat.

At their entrance, one of the smiths paused in his delicate labor of cutting a rough amethyst stone. His eyes, the cool, distant grey of dawn, swept over Maedhros before picking up his work again. “Brother,” the smith greeted as he began sanding the violet stone. His voice, unlike his eyes, traveled over the skin like a banked fire. “What a surprise to see you here. Have you finally grown tired of the jackals?”

“I am, as ever, content with the jackals, Curufin.” Maedhros’ mouth wore the shadow of a smile.

Curufin’s mouth curved back in wicked, sensual lines, yet his words seemed unkind to Glorfindel, “Because you have become one. What is not to like when you are part of the pack?” His eyes lifted to meet his brother’s. They did not possess the coldness Glorfindel expected to find after such words.

“Father understands and appreciates my place at court, as would you if you ever looked beyond your next creation.” Contrary to the words coming out of his mouth, Maedhros’ smile deepened enough for crinkles to start in his eyes’ corners.

“I am sure you would like to believe all your ingratiating has some purpose.” 

“Enough teasing, boys.” The voice sliced like a diamond blade between the brothers. “Maedhros speaks truly. I know the value of having a loyal son within a hive of vipers, especially in such treacherous times as these.” 

The voice’s owner stood on the far side of the forge. He stood at an anvil with a leather apron wrapped about his waist. His hair, shinning like an obsidian blade in the licking forge light, was tied high in a plume of night down his back. Even from this distance Glorfindel could see the scorching light in star-bright eyes. They burned with a fire unlike any he’d beheld. 

“Though,” the smith’s voice dropped into something complex, “the intimacy of acquaintance between Fingolfin and you yesterday was…unexpected.” He searched Maedhros’ face, his own hiding none of the battle waged inside, conflicting emotions flickering across it.

“Trust me, Father. _Trust me_.” Maedhros’ voice was impregnated with a hundred unspoken words –or words spoken long ago between them.

Fëanor dropped his tongs and reached his son in four long strides. One gloved hand, still flecked with metal dust, lifted to rest in the cradle between Maedhros’ neck and shoulder. “I promised you, and hold to it. I would deny you nothing. If his friendship is what you need, then take it. I will not allow myself to become a net around your heels, dragging you down.”

Such tenderness softened Maedhros’ face as he looked upon his father that it seemed to glow with a faint, white light. “You could never drag me down. I made my choice months ago, and it was wholly mine. Put this fear from your mind, Father. Fingolfin will never eclipse you in my heart. We were friends, that is all, and now we are not.”

Fëanor’s hand came up to brush the edge of his son’s jaw with the backs of knuckles. They shared a long look, finding what they sought in each other’s face. Fëanor turned and strode to his anvil, taking up his work again.

Maedhros turned to Curufin as his father’s mind fell back into the current of his art, jumping from one idea to the next, thoughts darting faster than sparrows. “I came to fetch Celebrimbor away.” He called Glorfindel forward who’d been watching it all from the long shadows cast by the low fire. “This is Glorfindel, Irimë’s son. Celebrimbor could spend some time getting to know his cousin.”

Curufin’s lip curled as his ran his eyes over Glorfindel. “You want my son to abandon his work to rub shoulders with one of Indis’ children?”

Maedhros raised a cool brow at his brother. They stared at each other, Maedhros not needed to speak a word to carry his message. Pink climbed up the delicate bones of Curufin’s cheeks. He looked away with a grumpy look.

Maedhros turned to the forge’s third occupant. The smith’s head had not lifted from his work since they arrived. There could be no doubt of his relation to Fëanor and Curufin with the way his black hair, fisted high, fell thick and glossy down his back. “Celebrimbor, come take your cousin outside to play.” The youth, who Maedhros addressed, tilted his head towards his uncle’s voice, but did not stop beating the fire-orange metal he’d caught between his hammer and anvil.

“He is working. I told you.” Curufin’s eyes ranked over Glorfindel, eyes narrowed as if he thought Glorfindel was about to pull out a knife and attack them at any moment. “What possessed you to bring _Irimë’s_ boy to our private forges?”

“Just get Celebrimbor to take him.” At Curufin’s mulish look, Maedhros added, “I would be indebted to you.”

Curufin’s eyes sparked with interest at the thought of his brother owing him a favor, even a very small one. “Very well, but let Celebrimbor finish his quench or the sw—metal will be ruined.” Maedhros shared a secret, sidelong look with his brother, and nodded.

Curufin abandoned his own gem cutting to pump the bellows. The fire leapt with new life, little winking sparks hit the air like burning snowflakes. The renewed firelight caught in the wealth of Glorfindel’s hair, making it shine like newly minted gold. 

Glorfindel, watching Curufin work the mighty bellows, the bared muscles in his well proportioned arms cutting fine shapes in the skin, didn’t see Fëanor’s eyes snap up to examine the startling golden light come into his forge like a reflection of Laurelin’s glory. Glorfindel only realized he’d captured Fëanor’s attention when Fëanor had slipped around the forge fire and to Glorfindel’s side like a stalking tiger.

The gaze directed at Glorfindel was so intense, so magnetic and mesmerizing, he forgot how to breathe. He had never seen the stars without the apron of Telperion’s light muffling their brilliance, but as he stared up into Fëanor’s eyes, he imagined this was what the stars must look like in the wilds of Middle-earth, beyond the light of the Two Trees. He was captured even before he knew he was being hunted.

Fëanor fingered a coil of Glorfindel’s hair without permission, not that the boy would have denied him. He didn’t think he could have said no to this man whatever the request. Fëanor hummed as his finger curled a wave about its tip. “Beautiful.” 

The single word sent shivers down Glorfindel’s spine, and when Fëanor’s thumb brushed across the back of his neck as its owner worked through his hair, a strange heat stretched in his belly. It felt like a lazy cat that had been asleep for a long time, and just now flexed its claws. It felt natural and old, like he should be able to name it because he’d been born with it, but it kept slipping into the crevasses of his mind.

“I would have a measure of your hair, child. I once asked another for a single strand of her hair and she refused.” Fëanor’s face twisted as if caught in an ugly memory, before smoothing back into lines of beauty. Maedhros had said Eru had created all Elves, but Glorfindel thought he must have paid special attention to Fëanor, for he seemed flawless perfection. “Will you also refuse me?” Fëanor hand tightened a degree in the locks it was buried in. 

Glorfindel didn’t feel afraid. Though the gesture could have seemed threatening to some, it delighted him. His belly twisted in ropes. It felt like the prelude to hunger, but he knew it wasn’t anything so common. His lips that would have offered Fëanor his beloved pony, his best gold-stitched tunic, the eternal devotion of a child who was yet not quite a child any longer, said: “No. I won’t refuse you.”

Fëanor’s smile was slow and full of teeth, but genuine. “Then you are wiser than Galadriel ever strove to be.” With that he released his hold on Glorfindel’s hair and started searching for scissors.

He only went three steps before Curufin slipped a pair into his hand. Curufin’s cool eyes ran over Glorfindel intently. Fëanor picked up a coil of Glorfindel’s wild hair, and sniped it neatly. His eyes swung back to Glorfindel’s face again as he reached for another curl, asking silent permission for more. Glorfindel gave it, and then gave it again, and yet one more time before Fëanor seemed satisfied with the four locks he’d taken. 

Glorfindel watched Fëanor run his fingers through the shone hair’s golden sheen, touching it like precious pearls. Then Fëanor wrapped the strands in a white cloth and tucked them against his breast. Glorfindel felt a surge of envy against those strands. It left him confused and frightened by its intensity. But more than anything he felt empty and cold as Fëanor walked away from him, Glorfindel already forgotten in the shadow of a new project. 

For Fëanor’s was the mind of an inventor, the mind behind his keen eyes as honed as a diamond blade, as deep as the ocean, and as swift as a loosed arrow. Glorfindel had been the subject of a sparked idea –or rather his hair had been—and now was of no importance to the greatest craftsman of the Elves. Glorfindel was but a child, lost in the river of Fëanor’s brilliant mind, swiftly swept aside for the more pressing matters of creation.

Glorfindel stared after Fëanor, for even if Fëanor had forgotten him, Glorfindel had not forgotten him. Where the hot, uncomfortable fire had started in his belly, now hollowness perched. He was overwhelmed by the desire to _will_ those star-bright eyes onto him again. 

He stared at Fëanor’s hands, elegant as Maedhros’, yet calloused by labor. He memorized the fall of hair, so black and smooth and sleek Glorfindel’s hands ached to run themselves through it. He followed the thick, deep arch of brows, the sharp strength of cheekbones. He traced the slope of a mouth, its lush curves, and knew he wanted it to kiss him like he kissed boys in dreams.

“Glorfindel,” Maedhros’ voice called him back from his despondent, enthralling, terrifying thoughts. 

He turned to see Maedhros watching him, and blushed under the scrutiny. Could Maedhros tell what he’d been thinking? He wasn’t sure wanting to kiss Maedhros’ father would be considered as acceptable to Maedhros as kissing boys. 

Maedhros didn’t say anything though, and he wore one of his unreadable looks again, the ones that made him the brilliant politician everyone said he was. Glorfindel did not doubt them, even though his knowledge of politician and courtiers was limited, he did know they were supposed to be good at lying. Maedhros must be exceptional than, because his face could close like a book. 

As Glorfindel waited for his cousin Celebrimbor to finish his ‘quenching’ (whatever that was), his eyes kept trailing ever back to Fëanor, whose aura was magnetic. He seemed impossible _not_ to look at. But for every time Glorfindel cast a glance Fëanor’s way (ever more boldly when Fëanor showed no sign of noticing), Fëanor cast not even one back at the donator of his latest inspiration.

*

Celebrimbor pounded the metal caught in the jaws of his tongs, eye running over the double-edged symmetry he pulled out of raw ore. This was his first attempt at making one of the swords his grandfather had designed. Grandfather believed in a smith understanding every aspect of his work, so for this first blade he’d taken Celebrimbor into the mountains and taught him how to extract the veins of rock, purifying them, and strengthening the brittle softness of raw iron into steel. 

Celebrimbor had wanted to share in the secret forging of weapons since his family had first taken steps to protect themselves against the treachery of Indis’ son. Usually working the harsher metals had never been his strength or passion; he delighted in the delicate molding of precious metals, and the cutting and polishing of gems. 

He examined the sword he’d been laboring over for weeks, seeing the strength he’d forged into the spine, and the edges that flared thin as a leaf, but more deadly than sharpened glass. He imaged it sitting upon his waist, its hilt and scabbard alive with precious stones, and finally understood the addiction of forging these weapons that had overtaken his father and grandfather, and not a small number of their other smiths as well. Here was power. It sat innocent as beauty in his hand, and _he_ had been its creator.

Satisfied with the blade’s sharpness and balance, he shoved it into the coal bed he’d prepared for the bath. When the edges glowed orange, he flipped it for an even bathing. When this side too had caught the heat, he plunged the sword into a bucket of water. The water hissed like snakes, and sent up curls of steam. He had completed the first quench. The steel would still need one more before he’d deem it perfect, but for now he set the sword aside, regretfully, and looked up to examine the boy he was expected to entertain. 

He watched the boy –yet another cousin—squirm under his appraisal. But where his father would have been amused at the younger boy’s discomfort, Celebrimbor was only annoyed. It was not like he was expecting friendship from one of Indis’ children. He had long since learned there would be no friendships for him, only grandson of Fëanor, outside the security of his grandfather’s followers. 

Since his family had uprooted and come to live permanently in this stifling city, he had learned there were those who’d categorized him as enemy before they’d ever met him because of a name. There were those who clung to him, wanting to hang off him like sycophants because of that name. And there were those who’d written him off without knowing him, hearing of his talent in the forge and trying to fit him into the mold of his family. They heard the name ‘Fëanorion’ and thought he’d be hot-tempered, or susceptible to the dreamy paths of artisans, or have the finesse of a charging bull in the dance of politics. 

Celebrimbor looked over at the boy, the child of Indis’-blood with the fair-hair of a Vanya. His father had taught him that those of Vanya-blood would despise them for daring to be discontent in ‘paradise’ and strive for _more_. His father taught him to spurn anyone who looked down on him for being a Fëanorion. 

Celebrimbor was sick to death of the politics spinning through the edges of every conversation, every meeting, every stranger eying him on the street and wondering whose side he was on. He would show them all –everyone who thought they could fit him into a cast. He would do so much more than surprise all those people who’d tried to box him in. He’d shatter their expectations of him. 

“Celebrimbor, come take Glorfindel out to play,” Uncle Maedhros called. 

His uncle wished to be free of the boy, probably intent on getting into yet another political ‘discussion’ with Grandfather. In which Maedhros would urge Fëanor to either bend his legendary charisma to good use, or steer well-clear of the delicate dance of politics. 

Fëanor detested politicking. He was also abysmally inept at it. He had no intuition for when to let things lie and allow Maedhros to handle their interests. Fëanor inevitably escalated every political conflict by striding right in with no care or patience for subtleties.

Politics were one of the only things Fëanor had ever failed at. Fëanor had no equal of mind or spirit. When he chose to, he could move mountains and light the very oceans on fire. But his passion lay in discovery and creation, the nimbleness of mind, hand, and eye. His grandfather was, above all else, a creator. 

Celebrimbor did as Maedhros asked. Though he resented the idea of playing like a child, he knew better than to complain. He was a Fëanorion, and Fëanorions did not whine. 

He forsook his craft and led the younger boy from the forge with a jerk of his head for the boy to follow. Through the cluster of smithies they went, leaving behind the comfortable smell of iron and fire. They drew away from the shadowing shoulders of Mount Tuna, into the fringes of the forest that ran up like a shy lover into the mount’s sloped arms.

Moodily, Celebrimbor kicked a pebble as he cast a dark look back at the boy who trailed him. He wanted to be at his anvil; his fingers itched to be shaping steel and spinning gold. Instead he was idle and bored, given the praiseless task of babysitting.

“Where are we going?” the boy broke into his brooding.

Celebrimbor turned fully around to study the boy. He wasn’t surprised the boy had caught his grandfather’s interest (Grandfather had an eye for beauty), and his father’s jealousy (Curufin was as jealous of Fëanor’s attentions as Fëanor was of Finwë’s). The boy’s hair was a mesh of golden light. Fëanor had always been inspired by light.

“Nowhere,” he answered disagreeably. 

The boy frowned, but strangely it reflected confusion and slight hurt rather than anger. That made Celebrimbor cock his head. From what he’d seen of Indis’ descendants, they were as quick to take offence as Fëanorions.

“We could play a game,” the boy suggested, a hopeful curve to his lips.

Celebrimbor looked at the boy suspiciously. He was being altogether too agreeable for a child of Indis, almost as if he wanted to be…friends. “What is your name again?” Celebrimbor demanded, aiming to give offence and re-build the wall of Indis and Míriel’s children between them.

But the boy just answered, altogether too cheerfully, “Glorfindel. You are my cousin Celebrimbor. I seem to have an awful lot of cousins, but you are the only one I have met my age…well Guilin is my cousin too, but he is little.”

Celebrimbor wanted to protest that he was older than Glorfindel, but their differences in age were slim by the Eldar’s measure, so he kept the words dammed behind his teeth.

Glorfindel continued, “I have met Cousin Aredhel, Fingon, Maedhros, Angrod, Aegnor, and some others I can’t remember all the names of. And of course Cousin Maglor, but I haven’t seen him since Mother and I came to Tirion, but he used to—” the boy slapped a hand over his mouth and gave Celebrimbor a wide-eyed look.

Celebrimbor, who hadn’t really been listening, cursed. If he’d been more attentive he might have gleaned something interesting –something that could help Maedhros defend their House’s interests. “Yes?” he prodded.

Glorfindel dropped his hand and shook his head. “I had better not say.”

Celebrimbor decided to make use of his time in the boy’s company. Hadn’t his uncle said Glorfindel’s mother was Irimë? Celebrimbor had never met his great-aunt, but he had heard her name mentioned from time to time and always with derision on Grandfather’s part. 

“I have heard your mother and Fingolfin are very close.”

“I don’t know,” Glorfindel confessed. “Uncle Fingolfin came to see us on the mountain, and he was very kind.” He blushed.

Curiosity overtook Celebrimbor. He forget the treasures he could mine from the boy’s openness, and felt instead an old, long surmounted but never extinguished curiosity to know what Indis’ firstborn son was really like. 

He knew Fingolfin no more than he did his grandmother Nerdanel. Fingolfin was a mystery viewed from the distance at feasts, and passed without word and scarcely a look in the hall. Celebrimbor bore the name Fëanorion, and that was an end to it. 

Maedhros defied the ‘rules’ by forging a friendship with Fingon, and Celegorm and his father would hunt with Aredhel, but Celebrimbor was nothing more than a child in their eyes. And the comradery that had once stood between the children of Indis and Míriel had fallen into strain. Those among the House of Finwë who had build no ties between Fëanor and the children of Indis’, now sent distrustful looks across the ever-widening gap that separated the offspring of Finwë’s wives.

His curiosity caused him to encourage Glorfindel’s talk, “Kind? How so?”

Glorfindel ducked his head. “His eyes are kind. They look at you as if you were everything.”

Celebrimbor frowned. He knew just what look Glorfindel spoke of. It was the way Grandfather looked at them. And sometimes, sometimes, it was the way his father looked at him. Those were the moments Celebrimbor horded like diamonds against his chest. If only they were common as river pebbles.

The shade of Celebrimbor’s mother wrapped her arms about Curufin alongside Nerdanel, she who had deserted her family –the sons yet in need of their mother. The two long-absent women pressed their nails into Curufin’s heart, and refused to let go. Celebrimbor’s mother was not dead, but she was as gone from their lives as Nerdanel:

Celebrimbor hid under the table, knees drawn tight to his chest like a shield against the throats spitting hate like bile. His mother and father were fighting again. He rocked himself slowly back and forth, back and forth. His mother wanted to go back to Tirion, and his father would not leave Grandfather or his brothers. He would not abandon his family for the comfort of a city. 

Celebrimbor had only seen the white towers of Tirion a handful of times. More often than not, his family traveled the wilds of Aman, with Grandfather’s followers packing along beside them. His mother had grown tired of it. She wanted a home in the city. She wanted to leave the adventures of her childhood spent wandering the wilds aside and grow _roots_.

Celebrimbor uncurled and scooted closer to the table legs, peeking from between their shelter to watch his parents tear into each other like wolves. He wished they would stop fighting. They always fought. Sometimes they fought about him, over him, around him, as if he wasn’t there, as if he was a thing not a person. 

Crouched beneath the table, huddling up against a leg that felt more welcoming than his parents’ arms, he saw Mother hit Father. The sharp slap across Father’s cheek left an angry red color. Then Father hit Mother back –thwack—with the back of his hand. She fell to the floor, a little cry torn out of her like a bird falling from the blue, blue sky upon the rocks.

“Mama?” he croaked, but nobody heard. 

Father bent over Mother, a worried look on his face, lips forming the ‘I’m sorry’ they always said after their fights, or sometimes after days and days of silence. Celebrimbor had learned not to trust the words. They didn’t mean anything. If Father and Mother were sorry, why did they keep fighting and fighting and fighting?

Then Uncle Maglor and Celegorm were there. They must have heard Mother crumple on the floor because his uncles had learned to creep softly and hide like hedgehogs when Mother and Father began. Now there was more shouting. 

Maglor’s voice, which usually soothed like soft rain and tickled the back of Celebrimbor’s throat like starlight, now clanged like symbols as he spoke hard words. Celebrimbor didn’t see his father look down, but knew by the silence that Father meant the ‘I’m sorry’ this time. Celegorm’s body blocked the path of Celebrimbor’s sight though, a fall of cornsilk hair a veil between Celebrimbor and his father’s downturned face. 

Uncle Celegorm found him and coaxed him from under the table, holding out his arms. His uncle was lean as a whip, but when he closed Celebrimbor in his arms, Celebrimbor felt like a bear was holding him. It felt safe. 

Celebrimbor could see his father’s face from this high in Uncle Celegorm’s arms. It went white like bones when he saw Celebrimbor in his brother’s arms.

“Little Fist,” his father’s voice sounded creaky as a broken branch as he called Celebrimbor by his nickname, the one only his father got to call him. Would Mother sound like that now she’d been broken?

Uncle Maglor helped Mother off the floor, dusting out her skirts and examining her cheek. Blood smeared her lip. Father wouldn’t look at her; he stared at his hands, Celebrimbor’s feet wrapped about Celegorm’s waist, the table, the wall, anything but Mother. He said he was sorry again and Celebrimbor knew he really meant it by the hitch in his voice, almost as if he would cry.

“Your knees had better get used to calluses, Curufin, because I am leaving. Do you hear me? I am leaving and you can beg and yell and hit whatever you like, but it won’t be me and it won’t be my son!” Mother’s eyes flashed bright with rage and the wetness of tears.

But Father’s head snapped up, nostril flaring like a stallion, “My son stays with me.” Celegorm’s arms tighten about Celebrimbor and Maglor flanked his brother, squaring-off against the one threatening to tear a piece of the Fëanorion tree apart.

Mother’s eyes swung back and forth between the three men. And then Uncle Maedhros was there asking what was going on. 

Mother let out a sob. “I won’t let you get away with this Curufin! He is my son too!” But she turned and fled up the stairs. 

Celebrimbor didn’t want to understand what was happening so he buried his head in Celegorm’s shoulder so he wouldn’t see his mother leave. He wondered if he was a traitor, because a part of him was happy the arguments stopped, was happy he got to stay with Father and all the uncles who loved him and Grandfather who promised to show him how to make shinny jewelry and craft metals when he was older.

Celegorm’s arms held him strong as tree roots. His father touched the curve of Celebrimbor’s back, and Celebrimbor peeked out of his shelter to see his father’s face. Father’s mouth dipped with sadness, and said he was sorry again. When he bent to kiss Celebrimbor’s cheek and promised to take him to watch Grandfather in the forge tomorrow, as Celebrimbor had been asking to do for ages, Celebrimbor knew he meant it.

Later, Uncle Celegorm took him tracking. He knew it was a distraction so he wouldn’t hear his uncles talking, but he didn’t mind. Uncle Celegorm promised to show him the paw prints of bears, teach him how to call a wild hawk to his forearm, and follow the willowy paths of deer. Celebrimbor pressed his face into his uncle’s tunic, and tightened his arms around his uncle’s waist. Uncle Celegorm smelt like sunlight, earth, and leather; he smelt comforting. He smelt like home. 

Glorfindel watched him, lip caught between his teeth as he rocked on his heels. Celebrimbor found it hard to believe they were so close in age. What kind of life had this boy led that he could still have the naivety of a child clinging to its mother’s skirt? Glorfindel was underdeveloped in body as well. Glorfindel, whose head should crown Celebrimbor’s shoulders, stood several inches below development. It seemed the boy was one of those unlucky ones who matured slowly.

Glorfindel smiled at him and it was like a thousand suns. It made Celebrimbor’s belly squirm. They were not _friends._ But when Glorfindel said, “We could play hide-and-seek,” Celebrimbor restrained from sneering.

Instead he found himself suggesting, “We can go scavenging in the woods.” He used to play this game with his father. His father would point out all the interesting stones to him, show him the lines of metal cutting across their skin, and fish for gold nuggets in the streams. 

“Oh! Like feathers and pretty stones? We can pick wildflowers too!” Glorfindel’s eyes danced.

“We are not picking flowers like girls.” This boy was strange.

Instead of being offended by the comparison to a girl, Glorfindel bit his lip and shot Celebrimbor anxious glances from under his lashes. “All right, what should we look for, then?”

Celebrimbor felt that strange feeling picking at him again, like fingers at harp strings. Glorfindel really wasn’t so bad. He didn’t get angry and didn’t try to challenge Celebrimbor’s leadership. That was not to say they were friends, but Celebrimbor decided he could be nice to this cousin for the rest of the afternoon, provided Glorfindel didn’t turn over a bad leaf. 

“Come on, I will show you.” He grabbed Glorfindel’s hand and plunged into the green twilight beneath the trees.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *poicindis (pure-bride): Women who were trained to be submissive to their husband’s in public, and fiercely protective of their children. Poicindis were a part of Vanyar culture, but not all Vanyar trained their daughters to be poicindis.

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 7

Irimë trailed after her mother down the corridor, silk dress wisp, whispering against the agnate tiled floor. The morning light spilled like playful water through the high windows of the domed corridor. It reflected off the reds, browns, and oranges of the agnate stone that had been polished to slippery smoothness. 

The women of Finwë’s House walked in solemn precession, Indis at their head like a goose leading her chicks. Irimë, as Indis’ only daughter, followed the train of her mother’s coral-pink gown. Behind walked Fingolfin’s wife Anairë who bent to whisper in her sister-in-law Eäwen’s ear. 

Eäwen had chosen to join them for the Morning Prayer, though her worship was given to the Sea-gods, as was the way with the Teleri. A few Teleri yet clung to the Old Ways, but even amongst the Foam-riders these ancient practices were largely abandoned. 

Anairë and Eäwen walked together, thick as thieves, as ever. Irimë tried to smother her jealousy, but could not choke it down. What would it be like to have a friend as close as a lover? She had Fingolfin, but her stay in Tirion had relieved the rift that had grown between them. Fingolfin had his own life and duties, and her place within that was small.

Irimë’s gaze flickered over Angrod’s wife, heavy with child, to land upon the soft, fair curls of Turgon’s wife Elenwë. Irimë tipped her chin up. She may have lost importance in Fingolfin’s life, but at least she didn’t bow and scrape before her husband like a little field mouse. She despised _poicindis_. They were meek and submissive, and gave women-kind a poor name. 

She tossed her head, dismissing Elenwë, and turning back to the tedious matter before her. Indis had come to her bedchamber every morning since Irimë’s return, calling her daughter to Morning Prayers. Irimë could have refused. It was on the tip of her tongue to expunge the outdated belief in her piety from her mother’s brain, but she bridled herself. 

Indis was devoted to the Valar, and Irimë loved her mother; it would hurt her to know her daughter gave the Valar only malediction. So she’d resigned herself to torturous hours on her knees as her lips formed words of empty worship. She did enjoy the gossip the ladies of Finwë’s House indulged in after. So for the price of not wounding her mother, she could endure some wasted hours of phony piety.

At the door of the prayer room Galadriel awaited them. Indis let out a joyous cry as she clasped her granddaughter’s hands and welcomed her in. Galadriel was a transitory presence at their gatherings; she came when the mood took her, which was not at all more often than not. But she made more of an effort to please Indis than Aredhel. Aredhel had not joined the women in their worship since her majority. 

Irimë had heard Galadriel named the fairest of Noldorin ladies, and with hair that embodied the light of Laurelin and Telperion it was not hard to see why. But Galadriel’s face carried the uptilt of arrogance. Irimë thought Aredhel’s words on Galadriel’s many similarities with Fëanor were true. They were both too proud and haughty, and for a Finwë to lay down such an accusation meant their arrogance rivaled the distant, cold stars.’

Indis led the way into the prayer room. The room resided in the southern wing of the palace, facing south towards Valimar where Yavanna had formed the Two Trees. A great glass-pained window filled the southern wall, offering a panoramic view into the rose gardens and Taniquetil’s shawled head. Indis knelt on a cushion, the other ladies following her into subservient pose. 

With reverent care, Indis lit the candles of Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Then she dipped the lit tip of the long match into bowls of plucked juniper and amber oil. The room bloomed with the fragrance of incense as Indis began the Morning Prayer: 

“Praise the King of the Valar, Lord of Aman, Lord of Arda. Thanks be to Manwë Súlimo, Lord of the Wind who opened the Golden Gates of Valinor to the Eldar and gifted us knowledge and joy. Eldar, give ear and listen to the wisdom of the High Ones of Arda. Oh Mightiest of Valar, set our feet upon the path of righteousness, and lead us not into the hands of pride and perversity, nor the trials of temptation. Blessed be the Valar who have put their Holy Hands upon the Eldar and given the weary strength.

Listen oh people of the Eldar, and take refuge in the shadow of Manwë’s wings. Our hungers have been sated from the abundance of Yavanna Kementári’s house, and from the stream of Ulmo’s delights we have quenched our thirst. For the Valar are the source of life, and by the Valars’ light shall we see all light.”

“Thanks be to Yavanna, Giver of Fruits, who nourishes us. Blessed be Yavanna, architect of the Two Trees.”

“Varda Elentári, Queen of the Stars—” Irimë’s mind drifted as her mouth formed the memorized lines, echoing her mother’s prayer along with the other women.

When it was finally over, and they were permitted to unfold themselves from the cushions, Irimë took a seat beside her mother in the ring of women. Refreshments were passed around, and Idril, who had fallen asleep with her head in her mother’s lap, was shaken awake. Eäwen and Anairë perched together on a settee, bodies angled together like arrows pointing out their intimacy, the V of their thighs closing all others out. Galadriel called her niece to her, and after receiving Elenwë’s permission, Idril knelt between her cousin’s strong legs as Galadriel wove intricate braids in the girl’s fair hair. 

“Our little goldfinch,” Indis smiled as she watched Galadriel braid her great-granddaughter’s hair. “You have raised her well, Elenwë,” she turned an approving look upon Elenwë who sat at a loom she kept in residence for these morning gatherings.

Elenwë blushed prettily, and smiled proudly at her daughter. Her eyes ever darted between her work and Idril’s place between Galadriel’s thighs, for as submissive as a _poicindis_ was to her husband, she was supposedly fierce in the protection of her children. 

A _poicindis_ mother in fear of their child’s life was said to be a fearsome sight. Irimë did not give credence to such rumors. Elenwë was weak, her timidity sickening. Irimë could not imagine such a frail creature scaring so much as a robin.

“Thank you, lady-mother,” Elenwë’s voice was delicate as candlelight. 

She veiled her eyes behind long lashes, dropping them back to the floor in a sign of deference. Her fingers threaded the shuttle and pulled colored pieces of wool through the open shed: yellow from yarrow flowers, reddish-violet from madder roots, green from chamomile, pink from geraniums petals, and blue from chicory. Irimë watched something beautiful bloom like a reluctant flower beneath Elenwë’s agile hands.

“That is beautiful work.” Indis spoke the complement Irimë had thought, but Irimë would never have stooped to flatter the meek woman.

Elenwë smiled, soft and sweet, “It will be a shawl from Idril. I confess I enjoy the beginning stages of weaving best, and now I reach the end.” Her cheeks let loose a puff of air as dainty as the bones in her face.

“Oh, why the beginning? I would have thought the completion of a task the most rewarding.”

“Oh,” Elenwë’s hands fluttered like birds, a sign of her nervousness at so much attention focused upon her. “It is…the creation…the flow of design in my mind’s-eye. Everything fresh and new with infinite possibilities.” 

Color rode her cheeks from the simple, ineloquent speech. Irimë had already dismissed the woman from her mind. Why couldn’t her nephews marry interesting girls? Instead they insisted on bringing home dull ones with no thoughts but pleasing their husbands and nursing their children in their empty heads. 

Her brothers had done little better. She watched uncharitably as Eäwen, the Swan-maiden, daughter of Olwë, King of the Teleri, bandied secrets with Anairë. Those two were not only boring, they were rude. 

Irimë recalled how neglectfully she’d treated Nerdanel. Indis and she had shown Nerdanel no more courtesy than Anairë and Eäwen now offered her. They had looked upon Nerdanel’s work-roughened hands, freckled face, and common manners, and shunned her. Irimë regretted the woman’s absent company now. At least Nerdanel had never been dull.

Galadriel finished tying the ends of Idril’s hair. The girl sprang up at the women’s encouragement and twirled about the room, showing off her new up-do. Idril skipped over to her mother and kissed the curve of her cheek. The women sighed and complemented Elenwë on what a good, sweet daughter Idril was.

“I shall pick Mama a bouquet of wildflowers so she can weave them in her hair, and Papa will say how pretty she looks!” 

“In a moment, my sweet,” Elenwë laughed. “We can go down to the fields after lunch.”

Eäwen looked upon Idril wistfully. “How I envy you, Elenwë, to still have a little one under your wing!” She mourned, speaking with the voice of universal motherhood: “Oh the sorrow of having children! At first they linger for your words and chase your skirts, but then one day they are gone, flown away. You can call and call but they will not heed a word from your lips. It is now you chasing after them! By the time they are grown, their presence in your home is as precious and scarce as Mithril.”

Indis murmured in agreement and consternation at the joys and pains of full-grown children. Angrod’s wife put a protective hand over her swelling belly, as if she could stop her child from ever growing up. 

The talk eventually circled about to their most prevailing topic of constant exasperation, grief, interest, ardor, discord, and overall subject of predilection: Men. It is strange, Irimë thought as the women expounded upon this and that grievance with their husband and sons or teased Galadriel on handsome young men they’d spied for her, that even surrounded by some of the most admired women of their people, their talk ever and on centered upon the men in their lives. She doubted those men spent half as much time thinking of them. It was a depressing thought, and she squirreled it away to join the nest of bitterness and resentment buried in the corners of her heart.

Their gathering broke up when the bells toiled in the high-noon of Laurelin’s light. Idril danced at her mother’s side as they filed out of the prayer room, eager to break their noon-day fast and be off gathering flowers in the pastures. Galadriel left their company at the door. She was like a jungle cat, regal head rising above them all. But like the leopard, she walked alone, solitary and serene as a mountain lake, and just as cold. 

They rounded a corner and found the doors of the Feasting Hall yawned open. The hall milled with Elves who had lain down their labors, or risen from lulling about the gardens, to fill their bellies with a hot meal. Their party paused as another corridor met theirs in a T, and a gaggle of men spilled from its mouth, blocking their path. Finrod’s head was among them, braided hair the pale yellow of a lily’s throat. 

The men bowed to the ladies, yielding the corridor. “Finrod!” Eäwen called, spotting her eldest son. 

Finrod took his mother’s offered hands, holding them by their elegant fingertips, “Mother.” 

Indis spoke to her grandson, “You have just missed Galadriel. I believe she went in search of you. We were at prayer this morning.” 

Finrod’s mouth tipped in displeasure to hear of his sister’s participation in Valar worship. In a court where politics were interwoven with religion, it was widely known that Finrod was the worst breed of hieratic. For unlike Irimë and Fingolfin, Finrod did not keep his disbelief quiet. 

Indis folded her hands in front of her, “Would you join us in a pray of thanksgiving to Yavanna when we break bread this hour? It would ease my heart to hear you blessing the gods.”

Finrod slipped his fingers from his mother’s grip, “I do not worship the Valar.”

“Finrod!” Indis chided, “You should not speak against the gods. The Valar deserve our gratitude and worship.” 

“Why?” Finrod asked, not so much a challenge as genuine curiosity to hear what Indis would reply. “Why do the Valar deserve our worship?”

“Because they provide our every need. They have given us the Light of the Trees, and the safety of Valinor.”

“So your argument is that we must worship the Valar because we are indebted to them?”

“It is not an _argument_ , it is a fact!”

Finrod ignored that, and pressed, “Yet is it not The One who created us? If any is deserving of worship, than it is he.”

Indis seized on this, “And yet you do not worship Eru Ilúvatar either, so by your own belief you are neglecting your duties.”

Finrod shook his head, “I do not believe in worshiping The One. I argued that if any is deserving of our worship it would be our creator, not that we must worship him. From all I have heard from the testimonies of the Eldest who awoke without father or mother, The One provided no sign and left no intuition in their hearts that he desired anything from the Children other than to _be_. That is where the theory that the Valar deserve our worship stumbles first: if The One did not require our worship, than who are the Valar to do so?”

“This is preposterous,” a flush climbed Indis’ cheeks, “cease this foolishness! The Valar are our gods, and we honor them with our praise. It is their due for their great gifts.”

“Ah, so you believe we must attempt to _earn_ the right to the Tree’s Light and lands in Valinor. Are we than renters who must compensate the house’s owner with honeyed-words and a submissive neck? Should we sell ourselves for the price of the Trees’ Light and bountiful lands? Or should we cease attempting to earn our ‘worthiness’ of the Valar’s gifts –which are not in truth gifts, but purchased goods, if payment is required—and seek our fortunes in the free lands of Endor? Or are they free? If Manwë claims lordship over all Arda, must we purchase the ‘rights’ to live anywhere on Arda with our worship? Yet would The One have created us and placed us here on Arda if our purpose was to be the servants of the Valar? But perhaps he did. What do we even know of The One? What were his motivations and desires when he created the Children? What is his—?”

“No more of this, Finrod,” Indis caught at his arm, “your tongue will lead you into trouble. Come with me and your grandfather to the Festival of Double Mirth. Come to Valimar, and look again upon the might of the Valar. It has been too long since you entered their temple and gazed upon their faces. You have forgotten their power.” 

“If my worship must be earned through fear, then that proves the Valar are no benevolent beings, and begs the question of what their purpose in luring the Elves to Valinor was. Was it as innocuous as a desire to have their egos strokes with our adoration? Or might their motivations have been more insidious?”

“You cannot _say_ such things!” Her fingers gripped white-knuckled to Finrod’s tunic sleeve, “Why are you doing this? Can’t you see the danger you are leading people into with your false teachings? Already lies and whispers have been spoken against the Valar –and by Fëanor no less! Where do you think such ideas will lead?”

“Teachings? Lead? I am only asking questions, beginning a discourse. Or has our society become so restricted that we have lost the right to ask questions? If that is the case, we are in peril indeed. For what is more dangerous to the health and survival of a society than—”

Indis cut him off, face pinched, “The Valar do not tolerate rabble-rousers. Though you may be motivated by a thirst for knowledge, I fear that it has run wild in you. And you must call it into check.” She turned to Eäwen, patting her arm. “Do not worry. I believe Finrod is a case of too much time spent seeking knowledge without purpose. We have seen how idle pursuits of knowledge in the younger generations have led many astray. But we will set Finrod on the right path again, and all this foolishness will be forgotten.” 

Finrod opened his mouth to reply, but never got the chance as all heads turned as one to the sound of running feet slapping against the corridors’ stones. Shouts rang like hammer blows in the high arched corridors. 

“What is this madness?” Indis’ hands reached out to gather her family about her as a hen would her chicks. They were all shocked by the appearance of panting men bursting down the hall. Such things were not often seen in Valinor, especially in the courts of the Noldor’s king.

One of the men flung his hand back to point from where he’d come. “Prince Fëanor has killed Prince Fingolfin!” 

Indis cried out and Anairë’s hand flew to her mouth.

“It is not so,” countered another of the men. “But blades were drawn and I fear blood might be shed, such was the fell-fire in Prince Fëanor’s eyes! Please, lady-queen,” the man turned to Indis, “only the King might calm Prince Fëanor, can he not be called?”

“Yes, yes.” Indis clung to the thought of her husband setting all things right. “Finrod,” she caught her grandson about his upper arm, fingers dinging into the hard muscle in her desperation. “Go quickly and fetch your grandfather! He is in the council chambers. Quickly now!” She sent him running down the corridor with a push as he scrambled to understand a situation they had not even a shred of experience with. 

“Anairë, Irimë, with me,” Indis caught their wrists as she gave instructions for Angrod’s pregnant wife, Elenwë, and little Idril to hurry to the safety of their chambers. Picking up their skirts, the three women followed the men who had come upon them with such ill-news to the scene of the rumored act of unheard violence in blessed Valinor.

Irimë’s heart beat like a drum in her chest as they broke into the light of Laurelin that shone clean and clear in the courtyard before the great door of Finwë’s palace. The women pushed their way through the large crowd, fighting their way through to the front. Irimë’s breath came out as a sob of relief when she saw Fingolfin standing tall and unharmed. 

Fëanor was nowhere in sight, but the sounds of raised voices drew her attention fleetingly to Fingon and Maedhros who were locked a rare, heated, and _public_ argument, with Caranthir and Celegorm standing at their brother’s shoulder against their cousin. Fingon’s voice rang out, hands gesticulating wildly in Maedhros’s face. Maedhros’ posture stiffened. His face at first glance showed no more emotion than stone, but there was betrayal crawling behind his eyes as Fingon rashly threw accusations about. Something withered here in this courtyard: an odds-defying friendship forged between opposing Houses. 

Irimë blamed Fëanor, and hoped his eldest had the sense to do the same. But even as she saw Maedhros struggling to hold back the hurt and lashing back at Fingon viscously with his own tongue, she felt no pity for one of Fëanor’s brood. Too much of her hated Maedhros for having what she could not: Maglor’s unconquerable loyalty and love. Caranthir and Celegorm spit their own words back at Fingon, Celegorm’s hand a protective weight on Maedhros’ shoulder. 

Indis, body trembling with the aftershocks of terror, marched up to Fingolfin. Her hand met his face with a crack. Fingolfin raised his hand to his cheek. “Don’t you _ever_ frighten me like that again!”

Now finally Finwë arrived. He took the scene in with heavy eyes – Indis’ ashen face, Fingon and Caranthir a hairsbreadth from blows—and snatched command of the spiraling situation with a few soothing, but irrefutable words. He sent the gathered crowd away. Fëanor’s sons he sent to their father and even these most prideful of Elves followed their grandfather’s commands with barely a word of argument. 

Fingon also Finwë bade find a calming activity to cool his hot-head. When only Fingolfin, Irimë, and Indis remained, he ushered them into a private chamber. Alone with them, Finwë laid aside the mantel of ruler and took Fingolfin into his arms, running his hands over his second born’s back and arms, as if to assure himself Fingolfin was uninjured and whole.

Finwë stepped back, releasing Fingolfin with a sigh. “How did I allow it to come to this?” Shaking his head, he pushed aside self-recriminations and fixed searching eyes upon his son’s face, “Tell me, Fingolfin. Tell me everything.”

Fingolfin hesitated, eyes flickering to the side. Just by this small gesture Irimë knew Fingolfin was about to lie to their father. “You yourself witnessed Fëanor’s false accusations in the council chamber, and how he drew his sword, brandishing it at me.”

“This I saw, yes, and grieved I am that Fëanor would act such. And yet, do not think yourself a victim in that matter, for was it not mere moments before Fëanor’s entrance you were speaking dishonorably of your brother, accusing Fëanor of disloyalty towards me?”

Fingolfin looked away, hands fisting at his sides as Finwë once again took the side of Fëanor above all others.

Irimë could not keep silent at the blatant favoritism, “But Fëanor did more, did he not? For men came running, crying that Fëanor had slain Fingolfin!”

“What is this?” 

But Fingolfin said nothing, turning away, the line of his shoulders straight and unyielding. In the wake of their father’s unfair words, Fingolfin would not speak poorly of Fëanor. “It was nothing. More of the same. The people were merely caught off-guard.” 

Irimë’s mouth compressed into a thin line, barely restraining herself from calling her brother a liar. 

Finwë’s eyed his son’s back from a long moment before conceding. “Very well. Thank you for telling me, Fingolfin.” 

He made to leave the room, but Indis latched onto his arm. “What do you mean to do, husband? Surely you cannot be thinking of letting Fëanor go unpunished for such an act!”

“I will speak with Fëanor, see what he has to say of his action, and then…we will see.” Finwë answered evasively, and Irimë wanted to snarl knowing her father would do _nothing_. Fëanor would throw a tantrum and make their father take his side, probably even turn it so that Fingolfin was wholly in the wrong. Fëanor was so good at wrapping their father about his finger.

Indis followed their father from the room, leaving Irimë alone with her lying brother. “Well,” her hands found her hips as she marched around Fingolfin’s turned back to meet his eyes, “how about the _truth_ now.”

Fingolfin signed heavily, “It hardly matters. Nothing I said would have made a difference to the outcome.”

“That is not the point! What did Fëanor really do?” When Fingolfin still did not answer, she changed directions, “Or maybe I should ask: what did _you_ do?” Fingolfin’s face remained unmoved, but Irimë knew she was right. “You plotted something, don’t try and deny it! I would say, though, that things didn’t turn out how you wanted.”

Fingolfin turned away, giving her his back as his eyes searched the window overlooking the gardens beyond. “No it did not. I never meant…” He held up a hand as Irimë started to speak, “No. It does not matter. It is done. Fëanor no doubt thinks me more a worm than before.” He gave a sharp shake of his head. “My _grand_ planes disintegrated spectacularly. Yet, I see that you were mistaken. Fëanor is not jealous of me; he loathes me as much as ever. But he is possessive of Father’s love as I thought, and of this I forgive him, forgave him even as he threatened…but now Fëanor...”

“Is farther away than ever and still thinks you are trying to steal Father’s love, usurp this place as firstborn, steal his Silmarils, and all the rest. You didn’t expect your ‘beloved’ brother to threatening you life, did you? Fëanor is not only impossibly proud, he is also criminally paranoid of even the _appearance_ of others encroaching upon what he considers his territory. You should not have forgotten this.” 

“I know. I was a fool.”

“You were.” She did not tell him of her relief at his short-sightedness. Maybe, after this disaster, Fingolfin would cease with these games to win Fëanor’s attention and earn his respect, love, enmity, anything but indifference and a place among the unworthy masses in Fëanor’s eyes. But she had little hope of Fingolfin ever calling off his pursuit of Fëanor. Fëanor was too much a part of who Fingolfin was. Fëanor had ingrained himself within every part of Fingolfin’s life from a very young age. 

Just as Fingolfin predicted, after a cozy chat with Fëanor, Finwë made no move to punish Fëanor. However, the Valar were not so given to favoritism in this matter, and for once Irimë was thankful for their intervention when they called Fëanor to the Ring of Doom to answer for his actions. It was a bittersweet victory when Fëanor was banished for twelve years, for Finwë, forsaking wife and family and rule, followed his firstborn and ever-most-loved son into exile, leaving Fingolfin to rule the Noldor in his stead. Whatever Fëanor might have accused Fingolfin of, picking up his father’s crown and having the fire of Fëanor absent from Tirion was not even a pale shadow of Fingolfin’s designs.


	8. Chapter 8

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 8

An ache pressed against the underside of his breastbone. It was a well known one, an old companion, like a hound he’d cradled at his chest when it was a ball of fluff, wet nose, and a tail that couldn’t stand still, but now lay at his feet, once bright eyes dulled with age.

This ache was an old friend. It was the place the breath of fire had never filled him, only brushed, here and there; a hundred meetings that left him empty as Fëanor’s back walked away.

The crown on his brow did not make him feel warm inside when the fire of the world had left the city –and everything and everyone in it—like discarded rags, to build a new home in the North. Fëanor’s banishment was a punishment for the ones left behind, not Fëanor. What could Fëanor lack when he’d taken everything and everyone he’d cared for with him into banishment?

Fingolfin’s left hand balled into a fist, curling into itself, knuckles flushing against the skin, until the moment of melancholy and self-pity had passed like a cloud rolling back from the stars. Such thoughts would bring him nothing. 

The hour of the Mingling had come and gone, and Telperion’s light spilled through the long windows of the family solar. The hearth had been lit. Angrod, Aegnor, and Fingon’s hunting hounds curled up before it beside the children. Guilin, Idril, and Glorfindel played jacks on the rug, while Elenwë watched from her chair beside the fire, a soft smile on her blossom mouth as nimble hands pulled beauty out of thread and needle. 

Turgon and Finrod had drawn away into a corner, chairs close enough they could lean into each other, faces picking up animation as they fell deep into the rhythm of debate. Galadriel surprised Fingolfin by joining them, taking her stately leave from the couches the other ladies had retired to –Anairë, Indis, Eäwen, Irimë, and Eldalótë, with Orodreth’s curly head cradled against his mother’s shoulder. 

Aredhel was not numbed among them. No surprise there. She’d joined the rowdy group of her cousins and brother across from what was left of the desserts the servants had brought in after the meal the family had enjoyed in the dining hall. 

Family dinners had gone out of fashion in the House of Finwë years ago. Fingolfin had rekindled them with all that was left of his family now the position of Head of Family had fallen to him with Finwë’s abdication. The dinners were held every month’s end, this being the third since Fingolfin re-established the practice. 

Glorfindel rose from his seat beside his cousins to heed his mother’s beckoning. The child crossed into the circle of women obediently, but his mouth set itself in a stubborn line when Irimë drew him onto the couch beside her. Irimë leaned in to whisper something in his ear. The longer she spoke, the tenser his body coiled.

She pulled back with a sigh, shaking her head at him. His eyes dropped, arms coming up to cross over his chest. With an almost hesitant hand, she pushed the hair back from his brow to tuck behind his ear. He went perfectly still at the touch, as if his whole attention had narrowed down to the line those fingers drew across his skin. 

Her thumb lingered on the slant of his jaw, just there, where it rose to meet his ear. Glorfindel tilted into the touch. She held it for a moment, stroking the soft skin, before dropping her hand. Her eyes rose to meet Fingolfin’s watching ones.

Fingolfin arched a brow at the expectant look. Did she look for some sign of approval from him that she had granted her son the rights any child deserved from their mother? Still, it had been a touch of affection. The interaction quieted some of his worries over Glorfindel and Irimë’s relationship, but he could not forget the intentions Irimë revealed to him that day in her mountain home. 

He feared his sister had gone through with her plans despite all his warnings. When he’d met Glorfindel, the boy had been shy, but full of laughter like sunshine, and his eyes had danced free of shadows. Though Fingolfin had seen little of Glorfindel and Irimë’s interactions since Finwë had rented a house for her in the city, Glorfindel’s laughter had grown scarce, and his eyes hesitant.

But his sister’s touch upon her son had been soft. She was his mother after all. A parent would never knowingly harm their child. Those parents who had attempted to ‘mold’ their children into ‘natural’ desires had done so out of fear for the child’s futures, as Irimë’s words upon the mountain had revealed in her own heart. Fingolfin must double his efforts to make her understand the consequences even a mother’s fear for her child can cost. He would open her eyes to see that even the sentence of a Shaming and the life of an Outcast were preferable to one stolen of smiles and lived out in misery.

Irimë released Glorfindel from her side. He made to join the children on the hearth rug again, but Fingon waved his cousin over with a grin. Glorfindel didn’t hesitate to follow the call. 

Fingon looped an arm about the boy’s shoulders and pulled him into his side as he turned to Aegnor and Angrod and boasted of Glorfindel’s prowess upon the archery fields and the boy’s seat upon a horse (‘A born rider!’). Glorfindel’s ears pinked, blush climbing his cheeks as Fingon sung his praise. Fingon ruffled his hair and dazzled the room with a smile. The brothers started ribbing Fingon on his own skills in the good-natured teasing that lay at the base of their friendship.

“He is not a poor rider! Fingon is the most skilled horseman in the world!” Glorfindel’s clear, outraged voice shut the teasing up. The three men exchanged smirks over their little cousin’s head. 

Fingon squeezed Glorfindel’s shoulder, winking down at him. “These two give me unending grief. What do you say; shall you come ride in my pocket here and be my very own Defender Glorfindel?”

“I—I,” Glorfindel’s face burned. “I don’t think I’d fit.”

Fingon threw his head back with a laugh. “That you would not! Look at you, almost a man yourself!” Glorfindel straightened, chin tilting up, but his head still did not brush his cousin’s shoulders.

Fingon kept his arm about Glorfindel’s shoulders as the banter moved on. His fingers came up at intervals to wind in the golden strands, twirling them lazily, or giving a playful pull, eyes slanting down to gage Glorfindel’s reactions with care. He looked for discomfort after the rocky start to his mentorship of Glorfindel, but found none, and thus was oblivious to the way the boy in his arms blushed and glowed under his touch. At least Glorfindel no longer shied from Fingon’s touch –the touch of an attractive male—but his infatuation was doomed from the start. 

The whisper of silk across the marble floor tiles turned Fingolfin’s head. Irimë had risen from her seat among the ladies. She crossed the room with a pinched mouth, eyes not wavering from her son’s blushing cheeks and bright eyes.

Fingolfin intercepted her. He snagged her arm, pulling her close to whisper in her ear, “You leave him be, Irimë.”

Irimë tried to shrug out of his grip, but he held her fast. She turned flashing eyes up at him, “He is _my son_.”

Fingolfin jaw tightened. “I will not have you sweeping this moment of innocent happiness from him.”

“He is making a spectacle of himself!” she hissed. “Can’t you see the way he _hangs_ off your son!”

“We are in private. There are none but his family to seen him.” Fingolfin understood the need to hide their true faces from court, layering masks over the desires of heart and flesh, and if this had been a public setting he might have even understood Irimë’s distress, but it was not. “Look at him,” he nodded back to Glorfindel who smiled shyly up at Fingon, “he is happy. Let him have this moment. It will reap no consequences.”

“You do not understand—” She broke off, swallowing the rest of her words back. She relaxed into his grip. “You speak the truth that he will come to no harm among his family. But, Fingolfin, do you not think such _openness_ allowed to run away with him might make the concealing of his…desires when he is among those who would do him harm the harder for this allowance?” 

She watched his face closely, her own softened, wearing an open earnestness, as if she was merely a mother driven to anxiety for the safety and future happiness of her son. And was she not? Yet there was something too…contrived in her manner. 

No, Fingolfin shook off the thought. Why would she not be exactly as she appeared? Glorfindel was her son; of course she loved him more than she could ever prize his reputation. “No. One must have a place –people—they can be themselves with and peel off the masks. We are the princes and princesses of the Noldor, certain expectations come with our birth, but with each other we must be as open as possible. To be forever trapped behind a mask is a slow death of suffocation.”

Irimë’s brow pinched, and her lashes swept down, concealing her eyes from him as she said, “Very well. For tonight we will do things your way.”

Fingolfin’s fingers squeezed her arm gently. “You will see it is good for him. Watch him this night, and remember how bright your son’s laughter, how sweet his smile once was, and cast aside these ideas of yours to instruct him in the changing of his nature.”

He released her. When she lifted her face it wore a hesitant smile. “I will watch.” 

Yes, let her watch. How could any parent continue in the crooked path of teaching their child a part of himself was not perfectly made? She would see, and her love for Glorfindel would silence the fears of the future. She would return to a woman who saw only the beauty of her child, and Glorfindel would learn to laugh like sunshine again.

*

Fingolfin watched his sister carefully in the following weeks, observing her every interaction with her son, but found nothing to disturb his heart. Her touches were gentle, if cautious, her words never sharp or critical though they lacked a certain warmth. There was not even the slightest hint of her poisoning Glorfindel’s mind against his nature. Was this not proof she had seen how wrong she had been? How could she not have seen? How could she have carried on when she was damaging her son?

After five months of careful observations, Irimë bowed out of her first family dinner, keeping Glorfindel at home with her. The slide into isolation was slow. Irimë sent her apologies to the family dinners that followed, always an excuse at hand for why she and Glorfindel could not attend. The months slipped by and Fingolfin saw little of either of them. 

When Glorfindel’s mentorship with Fingon fell to the wayside before Irimë’s flood of obligations, Fingolfin’s eyes, lured into a doze, snapped open. He became suddenly, sharply aware of Glorfindel’s absences and scarcity about the palace. He threw his mind back to the glimpses of Glorfindel he’d caught these last months, and the boy was not smiling in any of them.

He had allowed himself to be lured into complacency, and allowed the duties of rule to shove themselves before duty to his family. But he stood now on the step of Irimë’s towering mansion. No simple townhouse for a princess of House Finwë. The white marble jutted proud and soaring from a bed of manicured gardens.

The door swung open and a servant ushering him into a receiving hall of cool marble. He passed alcoves lining the entrance hall like columns, each one holding a life-like statue a compliment to Noldorin craftsmanship. He took a turn about the sitting room as he awaited his sister’s arrival. Paintings had been mounted to every wall, gilded frescoes bordered the ceiling. Each piece of furniture, and the glass and jewel ornaments displayed on the tables, were a delight to the eye (though too ostentatious for Fingolfin’s tastes). The house was akin to a dozen other such lord’s houses he had been entertained in for this function or that.

He turned at the sound of the door opening. Irimë swept in, head high, the golden skin of her shoulders on display with the elegant cut of her silk dress, and her gleaming hair set with pearls and sapphires. The house suited her. Fingolfin’s heart did not stir with admiration for either. Beautiful they were, yes, but adorned with the eyes of others in mind, ever presenting the appearance of perfection and overly concerned with the judgments of the viewer.

“Brother,” Irimë greeted him with a smile, holding out her hand for him to take.

He took her hand briefly, before dropping it. This was no pleasure call. “I will not trifle with you, Irimë. I am here on account of your son. Glorfindel has not been to see Guilin in weeks, and Fingon tells me he has stopped coming to their training sessions as well.”

The smile dropped like spuncandy from her mouth. “I told you in my letters I have been much occupied of late—”

“But Glorfindel has not.”

Irimë waved off his words. “I have begun his instruction in court life. He has accompanied me on my calls. He has much to learn.”

Fingolfin frowned. “Is that the path he wishes for his life?”

Irimë tossed her hair over her shoulder. “We are of royal blood, Fingolfin. It is the life we were born into.”

“Not so. My children have chosen their own courses in life, just as Finarfin’s and Fëanor’s have. A life of politics is not for everyone.”

Irimë paused. She turned away, angling her shoulder at him, and drifted to a table a glass figurine rose from like a fountain in a square. “Can you deny instruction in the ways of court could be good for him? What harm could it do to learn more of the world? If he chooses a different path in life, then so be it, but such lessons will do him good.” She turned a glance back at him from the corner of her eye.

He folded his arms across his chest, weight shifting to one hip. “He enjoyed his mentorship with Fingon, and excelled at it. You were the one who pushed so hard for it in the beginning. What has changed your mind?”

Irimë turned fully back to him, chin lifted. “You surprise me, Fingolfin. Was it not you who was so against the training from the start? Why this sudden change of heart?”

“Why yours?”

“Can a mother not change her mind on what is best for her child? Perhaps I came to see how you did: that Glorfindel was yet too young for such training.”

“That was two years ago. I do not believe it.”

Outrage rode her cheeks, flushing them with color. “Not believe me? Why would I lie about such a thing?”

“Why have you not attended the family dinners? Why has Glorfindel not been to see Guilin?” Fingolfin threw back.

Her mouth snapped shut, molding into a hard bud, before she said in a voice spun with a thread she might have believed reasonability but Fingolfin heard as patronizing, “Guilin is too young a playmate for Glorfindel. My son needs friends his own age.”

“Oh? And what playmates have you ‘arranged’ for him, then?”

Irimë floundered a moment. “I have been busy—”

Fingolfin took a step towards her, hand cutting her off in a sharp downward slice through the air, “Enough. What are you hiding?” 

“I hide nothing!”

“Then you will have no objections to me seeing him.”

Irimë’s shoulders came back, hands braced upon the table’s top as Fingolfin towered over her. “What is this really about, Fingolfin?”

“You know what it is about,” Fingolfin’s voice lashed hard as a windstorm. “Tell me now: have you taken up your misled plans to ‘cure’ him of his natural desires again?”

Irimë stared at him, mouth furious, cheeks pinked. She could not summon a quick enough denial.

“What is _wrong_ with you?” Fingolfin snapped, disbelief in every line of his face. “Can you not see how damaging it is to him? Why would you do this thing to your own child?”

“Cannot _you_ see what will happen to him if I do not?” Her eyes dropped the pride she wore like a crown, hand coming up to press against her heart. “He is my son, and I _love_ him, of course I do, Fingolfin! How dare you accuse me of loving him too little, of undertaking this task for anything but my love for him! You cannot know—you cannot know what I have scarified for his healing, for his future. Yes, it is a hard road, but it is the only one!”

Fingolfin pulled back, mouth twisted up, anger rolling through him like sickness at her words. “There is no healing in this thing you do to him. Did you listen to nothing I said to you that day or all the ones after? Again and Again I have counseled you against this, I have implored you to see reason, but you will not see! There is no happiness, no life worth living at the end of this road –only destruction. For both of you.”

She wavered. Her body trembled, knuckles cutting white against the skin where they gripped the table, eyes bright with tears. And then her whole body sagged, as if all the breath went out of her. She said in a weak, defeated voice, “I only did what I thought was best for him.”

Fingolfin’s heart softened to her. Now, at last, she had seen. He laid his hand on her shoulder. “It is a hard thing to look our mistakes in the face. But you have seen now, and with time, all things will be well again.” 

She looked up at him, and her face seemed to him the one he remembered from childhood. He smiled at his little sister. Now at last she could be as she once was. Glorfindel would be loved by his mother as he had always been meant to be loved. The smiles would find his mouth again, and his eyes would shine without shadows.

“Go. Bring him here to me, let me see him.” He had begun to turn away as he spoke, and out of the corner of his eye almost he thought he caught a look of darkness steal over her face, but when his eyes snapped back to her he found only a heartsick woman who had seen the terrible error of what she had done.

Irimë did as he asked, leaving Fingolfin to fetch her son. 

The boy stepped behind his mother into the room, arms crossed over his stomach, eyes watching Fingolfin from under lashes that did not sweep with shyness now but wariness. Irimë made to shut the door behind them, but Fingolfin interrupted the movement, “No, Irimë. I will speak to Glorfindel alone.”

Rebellion sparked in her eyes. She would not like to be shut out. She had always been like that, casting her eyes about for wrongs done to her, places she had been shorted. Or maybe not always, but in the years after her arranged marriage she had become a creature burrowed deep with bitterness, on the lookout for slights, never wanting to be overlooked, forgotten.

“Give me an hour,” he dropped his voice soft. He wondered if he loved her still as much as he now pitied her.

With a stiff line to her shoulders, she snapped the door shut behind her. His gaze fell back on Glorfindel. The child had hunched into himself, arms holding his stomach and eyes dropped as if expecting a scolding. The day Fingolfin met him, Glorfindel had done the same. Was it Glorfindel’s nature, this hesitancy, or all a product on Irimë’s false teachings? 

He stepped closer to the boy, coming to his knee before him. Glorfindel had passed his thirteenth Birthing Day now, and the position had Fingolfin’s head tilting up to meet the blue eyes of his nephew. He laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder, thumb feeling the curve of collarbone beneath the tunic. “Hello, Glorfindel.”

Glorfindel’s eyes came up, guarded. “What do you want?”

Fingolfin smiled. “I came to see you. We have missed you up at the palace. And Fingon in the Athlete’s Fields.”

“You came to visit me?” A frown bent Glorfindel’s brow. His voice dipped with complexity. Fingolfin couldn’t be sure if there had been a note of happiness threaded in.

“Yes,” he curled some of the boy’s storm of hair back behind his ear, “you look very nice today.” The boy had on an elegantly embroidered tunic of sky-blue. It brought out his eyes and made him look like the prince he was.

Glorfindel shot a glance back at the door where his mother had disappeared. The eyes he turned back to Fingolfin were fenced. “Mother had me prepare for tea with Lady Alotë this afternoon.”

“Do you enjoy the outings your mother takes you on?”

Glorfindel’s face stiffened. “I am grateful for the opportunity to learn.”

Fingolfin touched the child’s cheek, the skin soft as cream under the pad of his thumb. Glorfindel held still under the touch. His cheek did not chase Fingolfin’s fingers for more.

When Glorfindel had been new-come to Tirion with his mother, Fingolfin had taken the child aside on one of his play-dates with Guilin to make sure the child understood that the desiring of the same-sex was nothing to wear shame over. He had had to put aside his hopes that Irimë had listened to him when Maedhros had confided his own conversation with Glorfindel. Glorfindel’s responses to their talk had not alarmed Fingolfin; the child had grasped onto what Maedhros had told him, and his eyes shone clear and confident when he said, ‘Kissing boys is not a bad thing, Uncle Fingolfin, I know that now.’ Fingolfin had left that conversation with a heart lightened, and the conviction that it was only a matter of time before Irimë saw this as well. 

He no longer had hope Glorfindel still believed Maedhros’ words.

“You are a good boy, Glorfindel. I know my grandson is very fond of you. He misses you very much,” he kept his voice soft, touch tender as a candle’s flame upon the boy’s skin.

Glorfindel shook off the touch. His eyes flashed with something ugly. “Guilin is a stupid little boy. He can whine and cry like a baby because I didn’t come play with him. I don’t care.”

Fingolfin’s face shed its smile and picked up sternness. “That is no way to speak of your cousin and someone who has been nothing but a friend to you.”

Glorfindel’s mouth hardened. It looked very much like his mother’s in that moment. Stubborn and unapologetic though hurtful words had just piled out of it. 

Fingolfin forced the comparison down. Glorfindel was a good boy. He could not help it if his mother had been the strongest influence on his tender mind. “If you wish, I know Guilin would be happy to see you again. You may come play with him whenever you like.”

Glorfindel’s eyes shifted to a point over Fingolfin’s shoulder, mouth clamped tight. He gave no reply.

“If you worry for your mother, do not. Everything is going to be different now. I have spoken with her, and she sees the wrong she has done to you.”

Glorfindel’s eyes snapped to Fingolfin’s face. His hands tightened on his elbows; caution pressed into his eyes like bird tracks through snow. “What do you mean?”

Fingolfin rose to his feet. “Come, let me tell you of it.” He held out his hand for the child’s, but Glorfindel only eyed it, hands staying ducked against his sides. Fingolfin took a seat on one of the plush couches, and patted the cushion beside him. Glorfindel took it, but kept a considerable distance between their bodies. 

“Glorfindel,” he laid his hand down on the cushion between them, palm up, an offering. Glorfindel did not take his hand. Fingolfin left it there, resting between them, ready for Glorfindel’s move. “Your mother loves you, but she has done some very bad things. She has been teaching you lies. She has taught you that the loving of males is not a safe path for your life to take, is that right?”

The boy’s back had gone rigid, eyes staring straight ahead. 

“She has, perhaps, told you that no one will accept you because you desire to marry a man and not a woman.” Still Glorfindel did not speak. Fingolfin’s hand slid across the cushion, touching the boy’s thigh. Glorfindel jumped, eyes cutting up into Fingolfin’s face. 

“Shh, it is all right. Everything will be different now. You mother has seen that what she has done is wrong. She loves you, and the things she has been teaching you about the loving of males will end.” His hand rose from Glorfindel’s thigh to reach for his nephew’s hand, but Glorfindel pulled away before the touch brushed his skin. Fingolfin paused. “May I touch you?”

Glorfindel’s voice fell like the flat side of a blade, “No.”

Fingolfin studied the child’s profile. Once there had been softness and sweetness in every line. Now, the bones cut hard and sharp, as distant as a sheer cliff’s face. “There is nothing wrong with you, Glorfindel. You are exactly as you were born to be.” Glorfindel did not turn to him. He showed no reaction at all to Fingolfin’s words. “Your mother has hurt you, has lied to you, and has tried to change something about you that was created perfectly. There is nothing wrong with you, child, _nothing_.”

Glorfindel turned his eyes to Fingolfin at last, and there was only a challenge in them. And coolness. “Is that all? I would like to go back to my room now.” 

“I…” he swallowed. “No, that was all I wished to speak to you of. But Glorfindel,” his fingers twitched, almost rising to touch the child again on instinct, before remembering the child’s wishes. “I want you to know that I am here for you if you ever need me. That I care for you. Fingon does as well, and as long as you wish it, you may begin your training with him again. Would you like that?”

Glorfindel nodded, looking away.

“Good. I will tell him.” He studied the boy, a swath of golden hair cut off half of Glorfindel’s face from his view. He would have reached out and tucked it behind the boy’s ear if he had been allowed. “You may come up to the palace to see Guilin as well. Does that sound like something you would like?”

The boy shrugged.

“Well, if you wish it, you are welcome.” His hand rose, hovered over Glorfindel’s shoulder. The boy’s head turned, eyes following the hand’s progression. “May I embrace you before you take your leave?”

Glorfindel eyes left the hand to rise slowly to Fingolfin’s face. They shone with some unnamed emotion. “No.” He stood, and walked from the room without a backwards glance.

*

Glorfindel shut the door behind him. The Liar did not call him back. (Liar, Liar, Liar). Fingolfin was a liar, just like Maedhros. Where were they when his mother stood him before the mirror and showed him his ugliness? Where were they when his mother instructed him on the perversions of his flesh? Where were they when he was all alone in the dark with no one to hold him, no one to love him, no one to— They were far away, not bothering with the boy they’d claimed to care about because they were _liars_.

He turned to find his mother waiting. Windows ran like a garden of eyes along the hall’s upper wall. Light spilled in, falling in swaths of gold across the marble floor and catching in his mother’s curls and the silk of her dress. She looked like one of the statues of the Valar, beautiful and cold.

She crossed to him slowly, eyes holding his in their compelling grasp. Her feet fell soundless against the stones, but her dress whispered behind her like bird wings. “It was as I told you it would be. Wasn’t it, my son?”

He felt empty inside, like he’d filled his belly with a hot, southern wind. “Yes, Mother.”

“I am sorry.” She reached him, looking down at his uptilted face, her own picking up lines of regret. “I know how much it hurts you to hear it, but we must all of us face the truth. Truth can be brutal, it can wound us, but we are the stronger for knowing it and not buckling under its weight. Your uncle means well, but in the end he asked to see you to assuage his conscience. He does not love you as I do; he only cares about making himself feel like a righteous person. I love you enough to save you from yourself. That is true love, love that does not waver though the road has turned into a thicket of thrones and cuts us in the climb. Still I walk it with you. And together, my son, we will slay this deformity in you.” 

She took his chin in her hand, just the tips of her fingers. His face leaned in for more. He loved her, but could never please her no matter how hard he tried. If he could only stop dreaming of kissing boys, maybe she would love him again as she once had with more than words passing her lips that left him empty.

“I know it hurts you to hear it, but you know I spoke only the truth now. Your uncle may speak of acceptance, may tell you that he does not mind the unnaturalness of your desires, but when words do not match actions, the truth will out. He did not ask you to come live with him, did he?”

“No,” Glorfindel released the word in a whisper that brunt his lungs on the way up. He’d hoped, even after his mother had told him how it would be, that his uncle would….would what? Accept him, love him, _save_ him? Of course Fingolfin had not wanted a deviant like Glorfindel in his home.

“Shh, I know, my son. It was cruel of him to raise your hopes for nothing.” His mother stroked his cheek, and he turned into the touch, starving. “There now.” She dropped it all too soon, leaving him bereft and cold. “You cannot expect my brother to take the burden of your raising upon his shoulders. He says there is nothing wrong with your desires because it is easier for him to say that than to face the true reality of the perversion that has rooted itself in you.” 

He squeezed his eyes shut, looking away. 

“No. Look at me.” Her touch returned, harsh upon his skin now, jerking his chin back to her. He opened her eyes, and his heart broke all over again at the look she gave. “What am I to do with you?” she sighed, dropping her hand. “All these months, and still you do not learn.” 

She turned, sweeping past him to the door Fingolfin waited behind. “Go to your room now. We will have another lesson when I have finished with my brother.”

Glorfindel did not turn to watch her slip into the room. He heard the door shut behind her, and ran to the stairs, taking them two at a time. He bolted down the corridors until he reached his room, but took care not to slam the door behind him.

He stood in the middle of his room, eyes snared by the wall-length mirror waiting for him, mocking him, twisting his image to meet what he saw in his mind. Filthy. Perverted. It took a battle of will to pull away from it before the voices started hissing through his mind, using his mother’s voice. 

Not a scrap of clothing had been left thrown on the floor, not a wrinkle in the bed covers, not a book or toy out of place in the room. The boy in the mirror was hideous, but perfectly put together: tunic pressed, leggings spotless, and boots scruff-free.

There had always been expectations, even when he was young. The rules of his mother’s household were long, and not to be broken. Glorfindel had never quite met his mother’s expectations, never quite ironed out the places in his legs itching to run, never quite learned to sit perfectly still and eat with all the dignity of a prince at meal table, never quite learned to behave as his mother taught him. But once his mother’s disappointment had been endurable, for he’d been able to win her love, her craved kisses and hugs, and some days when she smiled at him he’d known she’d found something worthy of a smile in him.

But that was in another life. That was before he dreamed of boys. That was before his skin started weeping for his mother’s touch, just a brush of fingers, just a single smile of love upon her mouth. 

If he could only stop dreaming of boys, he could earn his mother’s love again. He would be perfect, he promised. He would do anything he was told, if only she would love him again.

*

Fingolfin watched for a change in Glorfindel. He kept hoping, even after months slipped by, that the boy would learn to laugh again. 

He used his power as Head of the Family to demand Irimë’s attendance at not only the monthly family dinners, but other gatherings besides. He observed her every interaction with Glorfindel, and while it lacked the warmth Elenwë shared with Idril, he gathered no evidence of her continued ‘instruction’ of Glorfindel.

Glorfindel took up his training with Fingon again, and even joined Guilin for afternoons of play. But such afternoons were rare, and while Fingolfin found a smile on the boy’s lips from time to time when with Fingon or Guilin, the smiles were not the sweet, open slices of the sky they had once been.

The months passed, and Fingolfin watched a quiet boy with smiles spare as diamonds grow into a youth. No happiness grew with him in his eyes. Fingolfin began to doubt. 

He confronted Irimë, and found only looks of confusion and hurt that he would think she had taken up her wrongful teachings again after she had promised not to. He looked into her face overflowing with regret for what she had done, and did not know if she was lying. He sought Glorfindel out, attempting to root out the truth, but the boy confided nothing. The more Fingolfin pressed, the more sullen Glorfindel became, shutting Fingolfin out.

Fingolfin was beginning to believe his sister was a liar. Yet he took no decisive action. He observed, unable to accept that Irimë could really be doing this to her son. How could she have gone back to this like a vulture returning to a decomposing corpse? How could she not see the unhappiness in Glorfindel’s eyes? 

No, that unhappiness must be from the years Fingolfin had not done enough. Surely, surely the unhappiness in those eyes came from the past, not the present. Glorfindel’s absent laugh, his wary eyes, and his body twitching away from touch, all these were the scars of the damage Irimë had inflicted upon Glorfindel _in the past_ , when she had been blind and in her ignorance had hurt her son, not now when Fingolfin had opened her eyes. 

She was Glorfindel’s mother. She had carried him in her womb, fed him from the flesh of her own soul, and sustained him with the bread of her love through the tender years of infancy. How could she have done anything else but renounce her wrongdoings when Fingolfin had pulled her crimes into the light and forced her to look upon the fullness of their vileness?


	9. You left yourself inside my heart

Intermission: You left yourself inside my heart

A frustrated breath blew out of Fingon as he drew the quill through the sole sentence he’d managed to string together. He dug his quill so sharply into the parchment, the ink splattered like an eruption of black lava droplets. 

He wadded up the letter and sent it sailing into a wastebasket overflowing with a dozen other letters that never got off the ground, each one a disaster. He had no talent for ordering his thoughts on paper. He left the essay writing to Turgon.

He slouched in his chair, throwing his head back with a groan. He sat a moment, mind blessedly blank, staring up at the ceiling. He’d sat in this exact same position trying to write this exact same letter so many times over the months since the Banishment he’d lost count. His shoulders rolled, and he pulled himself up out of the chair, not able to sit idle for long. He paced to the window, passing a pair of ridding breaches he’d left out on the floor, and the bow and quiver thrown down on his unmade bed from this morning’s practice. 

The room’s walls were dominated with weapons ranging from spears to knives to bows, all having their designated brackets to keep them from cluttering the floor. He snagged the recurve bow he’d been practicing with, and a quiver of arrows, as he passed, and set them in their places on the wall. He had few possessions, but while he was a far step from fastidious, he did care for the ones he had. 

The room reflected his lack of materialist drive. There were no shelves of books lining the walls, or tables cluttered with keepsakes and artistic pieces. The room was almost bare; he didn’t even hang his finest kills from the walls as other hunters did. For a Noldo, his disinterest in material possessions was unusual, but he’d never cared. He wore his hair however he liked, choosing ribbons over jewels, kept his wardrobe more suited for an athlete craving comfort than a prince, and paid no mind to the relentless air of one-upmanship saturating their culture.

His path to the window took him passed the cluster of chairs dragged in from any room they could be snuck out of, empty wine bottles, and scattered glasses left over from last night’s gathering. He’d invited some friends up last night, not being in the mood for taverns or large gatherings. He’d not wanted crowds, but nor had the idea of whittling the night away alone, missing the one he usually sought out during such moods, appealed to him.

When the desire for quiet company struck him, he found Maedhros. They would spend the night together, drinking wine, walking down to the Athletes’ Fields to act like irresponsible youths messing about and having a grand time with Telperion’s light the only witness to their antics and tipsy laughter. Sometimes they would pick the river to swim in instead, behaving like children set loose in the silver night, racing, dunking, half drowning each other as they competed, dared, and teased each other into laughter and more laughter. 

Other times Fingon would fall into a restless mood during the hours of Laurelin’s light, and he’d drag Maehdros hunting with him. He out-performed Maedhros in the hunt every time, and would tease Maedhros relentlessly over it, but teach him all his secret tricks at the same time, loving every minute of it: how Maedhros would give him that special smile of his, the one he only wore away from the public’s eye, and let Fingon enjoy the pleasure of teaching, though Celegorm must have already imparted a hundred better tricks before him.

When Maedhros was the one in a mood, they would sneak down to the forges, and it would be Maedhros teaching him tricks, voice smooth and compelling, sliding down Fingon’s skin like the comfort of velvet, the words clear and precise. He was a good teacher with six little brothers to hone the skill on. Fingon had never had a tutor in smith-craft, but he wasn’t half-bad. He had a dexterous hand and strong arm, if nothing else.

Fingon tapped his fingers against the window’s pane, restlessness building up in his chest like electricity, setting his limbs itching to move, burn, release, _express_ all these feelings tightening his muscles and pressing melancholy into his heart. 

He missed Maedhros. Maedhros was his best friend. Fingon loved him more than any woman he’d ever met. Maedhros loved him too, not more than his brothers and father, but certainly more than any woman. In fact, Fingon couldn’t think of any woman Maedhros had ever fancied, even if passing. They never really talked about women, though Fingon had had more than his share to talk about. 

Fingon sighed, pulled back from the window. Staring out at a garden and _thinking_ wasn’t going to solve anything. He missed Maedhros like a lost limb, like a best friend gone missing, like a broken off piece of his own soul, but unless he found the words to ink out an apology, and some way for Maedhros to forgive not only the words he’d spoke in anger in the Great Square but the months of silence since, brooding over missing Maehdros wasn’t helping. Fingon needed to be doing something.

He decided he’d go down to the Athletes’ Fields and run the track encircling it, shake out his limbs. Or he’d see if any of the other athletes could be picked up for a game of javelins or netball.

He snagged a leather thong for his hair as he loped out of the room, stride graceful, with a dash of cavalier. Heads always turned to watch him walk passed, and he drew crowds at the Athletes’ Fields, Elves coming down just to watch him move. He had a beautiful body, no sense denying it. He had none of Maedhros’ height, but he was compactly built, sleek muscles he’d built into that perfect balance between strength and lean lines. He liked the feel of his body moving, even for just a walk across the room.

He took note of the others who moved in similar ways. It was common among the athletes, but the hunters too had a taste of it. Celegorm walked like a predator, prowling and full of stealth and grace. Maehdros had a dancer’s stride, grace oozing from the tilt of his head to the tip of his toes.

Fingon gathered up his mass of braids, securing them with the thong, and pushed out into the corridor. A banner with his father’s heraldry blazing on a background of midnight blue, hung from the wall directly opposite his chamber’s entrance. Other nods to their House colors and symbols filled the corridor of their family’s wing of the palace. 

As he passed the open door to the family’s gathering room, his son’s giggles trickled out. Fingon poked his head in. Glorfindel and Guilin sat in the middle of the room on a carpet spread before the hearth, a checkerboard set up between them. The pile of captured pieces at Guilin’s elbow was like the peckings of a bird next to the catch of a wolf.

For the considerable gap in the boys’ ages, Guilin played a sharp enough game. Guilin had only been at the age for lessons for a few months now, but all his tutors said he had a fine head on his shoulders –not born with Turgon’s book smarts, but showing more promise than Fingon had at his studies.

Fingon was proud. He’d never thought much about having children before Guilin. He’d always supposed he’d find a girl one day to catch his heart, they’d marry, and children would naturally come along, but he hadn’t spent much time thinking over it. If he had imagined what he’d like out of a son, Guilin was just perfect. Still, Fingon wasn’t much of a father. He could be an older brother –he’d been that already—but he judged himself to be failing at the responsibilities of fatherhood. 

A child needed to be able to depend of their parent, to lean on him like Fingon had always been able to lean on his father. But more: the parent needed to be available when their child needed to depend on them. Fingon would never, ever, confess this aloud, but sometimes he forgot all about Guilin. He had some idea that parents were supposed to have their children’s locations and needs in the backs of their minds whatever they were doing, but Fingon could go hours, whole days, without remembering that oh right, he was a father now. He’d found himself out with his friends for the night, or gone off hunting, and suddenly recall that he had a son and maybe he should have sought Guilin out and asked him how his day had gone or tucked him into bed? It wasn’t that he never did those things or didn’t love his son, but his thoughts did not revolve around Guilin. Surely that was a sign Fingon was failing this thing called fatherhood.

Guilin made a joke –his son was clever—and Glorfindel laughed, for all of one heartbeat it was a free, singing sound, like the kiss of Laurelin’s light upon an upturned face, before the boy’s mouth sobered. He pulled himself in like a horse pulled up by a master’s reigns. Fingon had watched Glorfindel smother his laughter every time the free sound slipped out. 

Over the months since the boy’s arrival in the city, Fingon had found Glorfindel tagging after him to the Athletes’ Fields. He suspected Irimë to be the spider behind these occurrences. Fingon didn’t mind, he rather liked the boy, but Glorfindel needed to build up his confidence. Fingon had never met a boy as shy as Glorfindel.

Fingon decided to do something about it then and there as he listened to Glorfindel bottle up yet another laugh. He’d mentor the boy as Irimë had been hinting at. He’d been resisting because it was her who pushed it, but the boy needed someone to pump some self-confidence into him, and Fingon didn’t see anyone else volunteering. 

That decided, Fingon grinned as he crept into the room, approaching Guilin from the back. He raised a finger to his lips as Glorfindel, facing him, looked up from the game to spy his coming. Glorfindel’s eyes darted away, mouth struggling to conceal a smile. Fingon snatched Guilin up, “Got you!”

Guilin cried out in laughter as Fingon flipped him mid-air to catch in his arms. “Daddy!”

Fingon smacked a kiss on Guilin’s cheek, “Having fun, little cub?”

“Glorfindel and I are playing checkers!” 

Fingon eyed the board with exaggeration, “Are you really? Who’s winning?”

“Glorfindel.” Guilin’s smile dripped mischief, “But I have my sneak-attack coming.”

Fingon laughed, tossing Guilin over his shoulder, and smacking his son’s bottom lightly. “Don’t lie about something you can’t get away with. Bad boy.” Fingon swatted him again.

“Daddy!” Guilin’s legs kicked out, fists beating on Fingon’s back, protests almost inaudible from all the giggles spilling out, “Stop!” 

“More did he say?” Fingon passed Glorfindel a grin. Glorfindel watched them. There was no smile on his mouth, just a deep longing in his eyes. 

Fingon swung Guilin down to the floor. He winked at his son, darting a pointed glance at Glorfindel, taking care to conceal it from the boy. Guilin leaned forward, eager to be included in secret mischief. 

Fingon pressed his mouth into his son’s ear, “Do you think Glorfindel would like a turn?” 

Guilin nodded decisively, “Yes. Glorfindel doesn’t have his own daddy here to play with him.”

Fingon ruffled his son’s hair, “Quiet then. It is going to be a surprise.”

Guilin grinned and turned a glance over at Glorfindel who watched them with his fingers twisting in his tunic hem. Fingon straightened, and closed the distance to Glorfindel casually. Glorfindel’s head titled back as he came, a little frown on his face, biting his lip as if expecting a chiding word. That wouldn’t do at all. 

Glorfindel’s head reached to Fingon’s mid-chest, almost a youth more than a child, but Fingon had the boy lifted and flung over his shoulder in one ease move. Glorfindel let out a startled cry as he went flying up. Fingon smacked the boy’s bottom like he had his son’s, “That is for being too good an influence on Guilin,” he swatted him again, “and that is for being a well-behaved little thing.” Glorfindel hung still and stiff on his shoulder, hands fisting in the back of Fingon’s tunic. 

Fingon wanted the boy to laugh and play with him. He smacked the boy’s bottom again. “And that is for keeping that handsome laugh of yours hidden.”

But the boy still did not laugh. He kept absolutely silent. Fingon lowered Glorfindel carefully to his feet again. Glorfindel ducked his head, hair falling into his face and hiding his eyes.

“I apologize, Glorfindel. I did not mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“It is all right,” Glorfindel whispered.

“No, it is not.” Fingon’s hands lifted to take hold of the boy’s shoulders gently, but Glorfindel shied away from the touch. Fingon’s hand went up between them, palms out, “I am sorry. I will not touch you again if you don’t want me to.”

Glorfindel kept silent, still not meeting Fingon’s eyes.

“It is all right to say you don’t want me touching you. It is a good think to tell someone when you don’t want to be touched, and you certainly wouldn’t be the first to tell me to keep my hands to myself. I am the kind of person who likes touching others, but not everyone is, and that is all right.” Fingon angled his head, trying to catch the boy’s eyes, but Glorfindel kept his head lowered. 

Finally Glorfindel’s eyes lifted, meeting his. “It...it would be better if you didn’t touch me, I think.”

Fingon nodded, giving a smile. “If that is want you want. I wouldn’t touch you again without your permission. All right?”

Glorfindel swallowed, mouth turning down in something almost like sadness, like loss.

“Is that what you want, Glorfindel?” The boy had reacted poorly to touching, but Fingon didn’t think he’d been mistaken when he’d seen longing in the boy’s eyes. Fingon would just have to find another way to build familiarity between them. It would be problematic if Glorfindel’s resistance to touch extended to the training fields, but Fingon could think of another way to teach the boy without guiding his limbs and hands if it came to that.

“I think you shouldn’t touch me.”

Strange wording, but the meaning was clean enough. Fingon rose to his feet. “No touching then. We have a deal.” He smiled when Glorfindel looked up, holding it bright and warm. The boy smiled back, but sadness still lingered in its curves. “What do you say to tagging along to the Athletes’ Fields with me, hmm? Guilin can come watch me help you with your bowmanship.”

“I would like that, sir.” Glorfindel’s voice didn’t rise above a shy whisper.

Fingon snorted. “I am the last person you should be calling sir. Cousin or Fingon is fine.” His hand lifted, instinctively reaching out to tousle the boy’s hair, but he stopped himself inches from touching. He withdrew. He had to watch himself. The urge to touch freely and frequently came naturally to him. 

“Right then, off to the fields with us.” Fingon picked up Guilin’s hand, and held his other out for Glorfindel. “Only if you would like,” he wiggled his fingers.

Glorfindel’s gaze darted up to his face. Fingon quirked a smile, and the boy’s cheeks dusted with color. “I shouldn’t,” he mumbled.

“Well, if you change your mind…” He would have put a casual hand on the boy’s shoulder then, but he kept his hands to himself. “Let’s go, then.” 

The boys followed him down to the fields. They found them busy, athletes, both masters and training youths, buzzing about. Fingon led them over to the archery ranges, and helped Glorfindel select a child’s size bow to fit his arm’s length and height. The public bows for any athlete’s use weren’t of the quality of a custom made one, but they suited a beginner just fine.

Guilin begged Fingon into lifting him onto the fence’s top rail. Fingon suspected a father wasn’t supposed to cave to his son’s pleading eyes, especially when Guilin could hurt himself in a fall, but Fingon just told his son he’d better not come crying to him if he took a tumble. Guilin promised not to, and Fingon settled the boy next to a post in the fence for Guilin to hang onto before jogging over to Glorfindel who waited so patiently before one of the target lanes. The boy really was unbelievably well-behaved.

“All right, show me what you can do so far.” Fingon crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back in an easy stance to watch the boy shoot.

He spent the afternoon improving the boy’s stance, hold, and aim. He enjoyed teaching, and didn’t begrudge the time shaping the boy’s skill. They built an (almost) comfortable air between them. Glorfindel let him put his hands on him to demonstrate when words just weren’t enough, though the boy blushed and almost dropped the bow when Fingon stood behind him and arranged his stance and grip. The boy really was terribly shy. Fingon used his words to explain, and modeled as often as he could, for though Glorfindel let Fingon touch him, he withdrew into himself, growing quiet and solemn-faced in the wake of the blushes.

The crowds trickled away as the afternoon drew out and the hour of the evening meal approached. Fingon set Glorfindel to one more quiver-full of shots, telling him they would call it a day after, and turned to check on Guilin again (He’d tried to keep an eye on his son throughout the afternoon, though he couldn’t say how good of a job he’d done. At least Guilin hadn’t wandered off and lost or injured himself under Fingon’s watch). His gaze caught on the tall figure who’d taken up position leaning against the fence beside Guilin sometime in the last…whenever Fingon had looked over at his son last. Of course it had to be Fingolfin who discovered Fingon letting Guilin sit so high up and not keeping a decent eye on him.

Fingon sighed and jogged over to the pair. He put on a smile as he drew alongside them. “Father, what brings you down to the fields?”

His father’s brow lifted. “Guilin missed his afternoon lessons and caused quite a ruckus when no one could locate him in the palace.”

“He had lessons?” Fingon winced. He swung a glance over at Guilin. Guilin met his eyes with a guilty look, “Sorry, Daddy.”

Fingon should give his son a stern talking to, but Guilin looked so downcast he didn’t have the heart. “Hey now, get that chin up. No harm done. You will go tomorrow. The world is not ending because you wanted to skive off for a day.” Guilin face lit up, and Fingon slipped his hands into Guilin’s armpits to swing the boy down. “Run over and help Glorfindel collect his arrows –wait until he is done shooting!” He called at Guilin’s back dashing away.

Fingon braced himself, and turned a glance back at his father, but his father surprised him by meeting him with a smile. “His tutors might not agree with those sentiments.”

Fingon shrugged, “I never liked my tutors much anyway.”

Fingolfin laughed, “No, you never did, did you?”

Fingon slid his father a glance, “You are not upset at yet another demonstration of my poor influence on my son?”

Fingolfin’s brows closed together, “Who has been telling you you are a bad influence?”

Fingon shrugged, looking away. “Turgon had a few things to say.”

Fingolfin didn’t say anything for a long moment in which Fingon concentrated on analyzing Glorfindel’s stance. Then, quietly, “There is nothing wrong with your influence. You love him. That is worth more than all the discipline in the world.”

Fingon didn’t look back at his father yet. “Sometimes I think the reason I don’t become more involved in his life is because I know if I don’t you will, and he deserves a father like you. A son couldn’t ask for a better one.”

His father’s fingers dropped to tangle with his. Fingon squeezed them back. “It is I who am blessed beyond measure to have such a son as you.”

Fingon let that lie without challenging it, but he didn’t believe it in his heart. Fingolfin deserved the best for a son, and Fingon was a poor one.

Fingon nodded at Glorfindel where the boy shot his last arrows. “I have decided to mentor him. He is a natural athlete.”

Glorfindel reminded Fingon of himself, back before he discovered his skill upon the Athletes’ Fields, when all he had to measure his worth by was essays covered in his tutors’ unimpressed comments and a little brother who’d already outstripped him in everything from history lessons to maths. Fingon was a few years older than Guilin when he discovered he was more than a boy who ‘struggled’ and ‘showed little potential,’ with knees that jiggled against desk legs, a mind unable to endure the tedium of book lessons, and a body that popped up, needed to understand a concept with his body and drove his tutors to shouts of ‘Why can’t you just _sit still_?’

The first time his father sat him on a horse, he’d know this was something special. As he aged, all the childhood games he’d always been picked first for and excelled at, translated into an excellence that could be measured and noted out here on the Athletes’ Fields. He learned the bow, spear, javelin, anything he could fit into his hands and use his body to master. He took up hunting, wrestling matches, footraces, excelling at everything he put his body to, far outstripping his peers as he had once been outstripped in book learning. 

His father found him a dance and music tutor at the usual age for learning the finer arts, and Fingon’s grace of movement sent the tutor’s eyebrows rising in pleased surprise, and his music tutor had nothing but praise to fill his father’s ear with for the very first time. His fingers were light upon a harp’s strings, feet sure upon a dance floor. He learned he was good with his body. 

Glorfindel had this same intrinsic intelligence inside his body that Fingon had. Fingon was determined to pull it up, nurture it until it blossomed, and Glorfindel found his place in the world and a confidence in his step as Fingon had.

Fingolfin turned to him, and Fingon looked back, finding surprise on his father’s features. “I had not expected you to want to mentor the boy, but I suppose I should have. You have the temperament for a teacher, but…” Fingolfin looked out at Glorfindel again, a shadow falling over his face, “I worry for this one. It is not that I doubt your heart or ability to mentor another, but this one…Glorfindel needs much nurturing I fear.”

“He is shy, that is for certain.” And there was too much starvation in his eyes when Fingon praised him for the littlest of things. He ate it up, but needed more and more. Well, Fingon had no shortage of praise and no hesitation in dealing it out.

“It is more than shyness.” 

Fingon turned to look back at his father, catching something in the tone of the words. Fingolfin had a deep frown etched into his brows. “What worries you?”

Fingolfin sighed. “It is for Glorfindel to share. I will only say that I worry over his relationship with his mother. Irimë loves him, he is her son after all, and I continue to hope she will see the folly of her current path and redress the wrongs done soon.” They watched the boys pluck the arrows out of the target. “All I will say is that I fear she has planted the idea in his head that something about him is wrong and in need of ‘fixing.’”

“Then we will just tell him he is a good boy as many times as it takes to sink in.”

Fingolfin looked back at him. A soft smile caught up the tips of his mouth. “Have I told you today that I adore you?”

His father had quite a few inches on him, but Fingon slipped an arm under his father’s to give him a side-hug. “You spoil me.”

Fingolfin’s hand came up to play with Fingon’s braids. “No, it is I who am spoiled.” He pressed a kiss into Fingon’s forehead that reached down and warmed Fingon’s bones. He may be a poor son, but he never doubted for a moment that he would always be loved.

*

Celegorm ran a brush down his horse’s flanks. He always chose to tend the beasts himself. There were few things he excelled at over his brothers, but the handling of animals was one. He liked the accomplished, useful feeling he achieved from a good hunt and a contentedly stabled horse. 

He’d already passed off the fruits of this latest hunt to servants. The buck was ripe, and had taken two Elves to carry the animal to the kitchens. Along with the twin’s catch, there would be plenty meat leftover to grace the humbler tables of the servants. 

Amrod slipped the saddle off his mount and set it aside for cleaning. He’d been determined to take the full-head of antlers on his buck home to show Father. It was an impressive kill, but a messy endeavor, and blood now stained the leather of his saddle, as well as his horse’s coat.

Amras had already finished tending his mount, and now picked through his arrows, looking for bent fletches. Celegorm smiled, watching his little brother. Amras was like that, always worried something was out of place, determined to get things just right. He was the same with his paintings. He’d claim something felt ‘off’ or ‘incomplete,’ though they looked perfect to Celegorm, but he had no eye for such things. Even Amrod had more instinct for the artistic than Celegorm.

“I refuse to stare up at that monstrosity while I am eating my supper,” Amras said of Amrod’s stag’s head. “I do not care how fine a kill it was, it is shedding.” Indeed, the stag’s antlers were shedding their velvet layer in long, shaggy strings.

Amrod did not answer. He fetched a wet brush and started working the blood out of his horse’s coat. Amras would have his gripe, but in the end he’d let Amrod do as he liked, as he always did. There could be no doubt who the leader of the two was, strange though it appeared to outside watchers that the quiet one of Fëanor’s twins should be the headstrong one.

The twins were so alike, as if they’d been created to be one soul but gotten sliced somehow in the business of growing. Yet they were different too. Amrod was the quiet, wild one, the stronger hunter who loved the forests almost as much as Celegorm. Amras was the artist, and the one who talked for the both of them as if he’d gotten their tongue and Amrod their stubborn jaw. 

Of all Celegorm’s brothers –save only Curufin—he was closest to the twins. 

The twins were much younger than Curufin. Curufin was well into learning his letters and sums, and had just stopped following Mother around to follow Father to the forge, when the twins came along. It was no greater than the gaps between other Elven children, but nothing about Fëanor’s brood had been like other children. They had all come piling into the world one atop the other at a rate that alarmed most of Tirion. When the years grew long after Curufin’s birth, most believed the House of Fëanor to be complete. Fëanor, of course, had to prove them all wrong. 

The twins were young enough that Curufin was married, and Celebrimbor born, before they were of age. If Celebrimbor had been closer in temperament to the twins, they could have stood in as elder brothers, rather than uncles. But Celebrimbor was born from the ashes of a forge fire, his skin assembled from smoke and gems, and his blood pumping creation. 

Celegorm had stepped into their mother’s place when she turned her back on them. He was the one who saw to the twins’ rearing as their mother should have. Their education had been a family affair though, each brother taking the twins under their wing for the discipline that came most naturally to them. Father had been there too, but Father had so much to do, and five other sons. Celegorm had no other obligations, and took up the task of elder brother and protector enthusiastically. 

As they walked from the stables to the house, Celegorm watched the twins loop arms in each other’s elbows and walk in perfect sync. Their matching ginger braids swung in long tails behind them. Amras’ quiver strapped to his left shoulder, and Amrod’s to his right, was the only identifying feature to alert on outsider to their identity. The twins loved that one of them favored their right-hand and the other his left. It was yet another reminder that they had been formed from one in the beginning.

They found the rest of their family sitting down for the evening meal, all except Father. Caranthir had his nose buried in a book, one hand shoving spoonfuls of stew into his mouth, the other laxly holding a quill until he emerged from his hungry reading to scratch mathematical equations into the parchment. 

Maedhros discussed something that sounded boring and political with Grandfather, and Maglor picked at his food, lost in some thought or other. Celegorm slid into his seat next to Curufin. He smiled when Curufin started cutting up his bread in ridiculously precise portions for something about to end up in his stomach. 

Celegorm picked up the ladle and scooped himself a generous serving of soup. Then, because they were _his twins_ , and grown though they were he still liked taking care of them, he served the twins as well.

Fëanor came in and all eyes looked over to him automatically. That was just who Father was. He did something as mundane as stride over to the washing basin, and they all had to pause whatever they were doing to notice him. He had a smudge of soot marking his cheekbone like a woman’s blush, and his hair frizzled from the muggy heat of the forges, but his magnetic charisma still drew every eye.

He sat at the head of the table, Finwë across from him. With Father’s arrival, the meal began in earnest. He asked each of them, Celebrimbor included, what they’d occupied themselves with that day. The questioning left them feeling both loved and, in some cases, exasperated their father was still getting involved in their business, grown adults though they were. 

With Fëanor came both reprimands and laughter: “Caranthir, no reading at the table.” “That is a magnificent beast, Amrod. It is not going on the wall.” Amras laughed at his brother’s face. His laugh was the addictive kind that bubbled up from his soul in giggles, and soon everyone was smiling. 

When Celebrimbor laughed, Curufin’s smile deepened. He touched the shell of Celebrimbor’s ear. It was a perfect moment.

It was interrupted. A servant came in, announcing a post-rider from Tirion. Finwë had received weekly letters from Indis and Fingolfin, but it had only been a few days since the last delivery, and no one in Fëanor’s family had received so much as a line from Tirion in the months since their banishment. Everyone’s heads snapped to the door, but the laughter was gone, and Celegorm wished for nothing more than its return. 

The rider came in, bowing to Finwë who waved the man’s obeisance aside, saying he was no longer a king. The man’s boots trailed clumps of dried mud onto the floor boards –something he apologized for profusely, face red—as he drew the curiously awaited letter from his cloak and presented it not to Finwë or Fëanor, but Maedhros. Maedhros received it with an elegant sweep of his hand, and a polite word of thanks. 

The teasing started up immediately. Amras asked if it was a love letter from Maedhros’ secret admirer. But then innocent teasing morphed into something else when Caranthir said scathingly that Maedhros wouldn’t know what to do with one. 

Maedhros shot Caranthir a chilly look. Caranthir’s lip curled. Fëanor brought an end to the hostility with a sharp word. 

Caranthir still nursed bitterness over his argument with Maedhros on the day of the Banishment. Things made perfect sense in Celegorm’s head when he was standing at his brother’s side against that cad Fingon who flung accusations at Maedhros. Caranthir had not thought so, and had spoken with Maedhros after privately. All anyone knew was that they had argued, but neither would say about what. It could only be about Fingon though for Maedhros to still hold his forgiveness tight in his fists. Under any other circumstances Maedhros would have been the reasonable elder brother and held out the hand of reconciliation. But not this time. 

No one at the table was ready to see the letter disappear into Maedhros’ tunic, so Celegorm tried to snatch it out of Maedhros’ hands, but his elder brother was too quick for him. Unfortunately the maneuver caused the letter to be flashed to the rest of the room, and all curiously over the sender was solved when Finwë exclaimed, “Is that my grandson Fingon’s handwriting? I have not heard much of how he is faring lately. Come Maedhros, let us hear what Fingon has to say.”

Maedhros shifted under the combined weight of all their stares, not eager to read his private correspondence aloud. 

Caranthir spared Maedhros from finding a delicate way to refuse Grandfather when he exploded out of his chair, “You are _writing_ to that bastard?” 

“Here now! I will not have that kind of language directed at one of my grandsons, less by their own cousin!” Finwë rebuked.

But Caranthir was hardly cowed. Curufin’s eyes narrowed to slits at the announcement of the letter’s sender. He dropped into the tense room like the cutting of a blade, harsh and cold: “He called Maedhros a coward.”

Fëanor’s eyes hooded, and he leaned back in his chair, fixing an assessing glance on Maedhros. “Is that so?”

Maedhros’ lips tightened, the only sign of his tightly controlled emotions, and gave a mute shrug.

“He did,” Celegorm answered for Maedhros. “I heard it as well. It was in the courtyard after…you and Fingolfin…” He stumbled over the Incident none of them talked about openly, but pressed on, irritated by his own faltering, “It was not the only thing Fingon said either.” Rounding on Maedhros he snarled, “I cannot believe you are writing that selfish prick!” He’d thought _that_ over and done with. 

“I am not,” Maedhros snapped. “This is the first time he has written. You know very well I have received no other letters. And I have sent none of my own.”

“But you will,” Caranthir said with conviction, “you will write him back, even after everything.”

Maedhros did not deny it. His fingers curled instinctively over the letter as if shielding its words from the accusing eyes of his family. Without a denial, Maedhros had as good as declared his intention, and the dinner descended into chaos. Caranthir and Celegorm weren’t the only ones fuming at the idea of their brother being called a coward, not to mention it was a son of Indis who threw the accusation. Finwë denied Fingon could have done any of the things he was being accused of, but was thoroughly drowned out by the many voices of his grandsons.

Celegorm watched Maedhros shut down completely in the sea of aggression. Maedhros did what he always did when he was especially angry. He gave them the silent treatment. It was that or talk down to them in a superior voice, but Maedhros reserved his mockery to those outside his family, for the most part. 

With his family seeming to gang up against him, Maedhros stood from the table and made to stalk out of the room with a cold shoulder. Only Maedhros could make miffed look so refined, or hide the very fact he _had_ a temper from all but those closest to him.

Before Maedhros could flee the room, Father, who had been a silent observer of his sons’ outrage, stopped him. “Maedhros.” It was only one word, but it held Maedhros still, waiting. 

Fëanor rose and crossed to Maedhros’ stiff form. He reached up and touched his son’s cheek, the gesture as tender as it was possessive. “Fingolfin’s blind, foolish boy does not deserve you.” 

Maedhros met their father’s eyes, his own steady, “You do not know him.”

Fëanor’s touch dropped, face drawing down in a frown. “That is true, but I do not need to know him to see how much he hurts you.” 

Maedhros held their father’s eyes. There was so much disappointment in their depths it left Celegorm spinning. Of course he knew Maedhros had a bit of an infatuation with Fingon, but enough to look at Father like _that_ over their cousin? “As long as you do not know him, you will never fully know me.”

Maedhros hurt Father; it was in Father’s eyes. This wasn’t an argument over the way Fëanor conducted politics, or Maedhros near begging Father to restrain his outspoken discontent with the Valar and hostility and paranoia against Indis’ blood, please Father, do not draw the Valar’s eye so! Do not let them know the discontent in your heart. They are watching, Father, think you they do not read every word you have published, and heard every rumor of what you have spoken of so boldly in the square? Step softly, Father, step softly now. 

Wise advice as this might have been, Maedhros could no more restrain Father than Mother could have.

Only a few weeks later, Fingon rode into Formenos, a dazzling grin on his face when he spotted Maedhros’ waiting form. Celegorm wasn’t the only one who noticed the smile splitting Maedhros’ face at the sight of Fingon riding in at a reckless speed with a pack of hunting hounds at his heels –his brightest smile since the Banishment. Fingon may not have received a warm welcome from most of Maedhros’ brothers, but none of them set upon him like a pack of wolves. They would _try_ , or at least ignore, as Maedhros had asked of them. 

Fëanor never said another word against Fingon, though he never quite warmed up to him, not to the degree Maedhros longed for. Fëanor tried though, he tried. But Celegorm thought that until Fingon stopped hurting Maedhros with his blindness towards Maedhros’ feelings, Fëanor would never be able to do more than tolerate his nephew.


	10. Chapter 9

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 9

Glorfindel never had many friends. Friendship required trust. 

It wasn’t that other boys or girls didn’t want to play with him. He was a grandson of the king; what child wouldn’t seek out his company? He had no trouble finding other boys in Tirion to follow at his heels, ready to make him their leader in the wild adventures of youth. It was not the opportunity that held him back; it was the fear. 

What if the other children would be able to see the dirtiness inside him like letters painted on his forehead? Would he betray himself with a single look? Would waving his hand just so, tilting his hip a bit too much like a girl, wearing this color of coral a shade too close to pink, out his deepest secret?

Maedhros, who lied but lied so beautifully, said they were special for wanting to kiss boys, but if this was what special felt like, it a special kind of curse.

He lived in fear, a terror that forever knotted his stomach and gripped his throat in a choke-hold. Did they know? What was that sidelong look? Had he been discovered? His mother had stuffed his head with horror stories of what would happen to him if anyone, _anyone_ , discovered the abomination he had become. He must hide himself always. Cut off those offending parts and stuff them so far down in the cracks of his being that no one would ever discover them. They were vile, and he was dirty for possessing them. 

( _One day you will find the one your soul will marry._ ) 

Maedhros had been a liar. The marriage of souls? Really? Glorfindel was far too old to buy into fairytales. The idea of ever being free of the fear long enough to feel anything but shame when his eyes lingered a moment too long on a boy, was as laughable as thinking he’d ever be able to scrub the deprived desires from his mind.

He dug his fingers into the horse’s coarse mane. With the natural ease of a born rider, he kneed the horse towards the stables, body rolling with the horse’s strides as it broke into a trot. 

The boy who’d threaded ribbons into his pony’s tail was long suppressed for the one who tied his hair back in a tight, no-nonsense braid while he trained hours upon hours to become what every other _normal_ boy idolized: a Champion in Lord Tulkas’ Games. He wasn’t there yet, but with Fingon’s training he might just take the prize in horseback riding next Games. Everyone agreed he was an exceptional rider. And once he reached his majority and gained the muscle mass the other competitors’ boasted, he might give the Champions in other events a run for their gold.

Fingon met him in the stables as Glorfindel slid down the horse’s sweaty back. His cousin grinned so widely it was a wonder it didn’t consume his face. “You did the House of Finwë proud,” he ruffled Glorfindel’s hair, uncaring that he messed up Glorfindel’s braid. And then quieter, but no less sincerely, “I knew you could do it. What did I tell you? All those sprints paid off in spades, didn’t they?”

Glorfindel’s mouth curved in a rare smile under his cousin’s praise. He secretly worshiped Fingon, even as he was ashamed of the bad thoughts Fingon stirred in him. 

Fingon was everything Glorfindel’s mother wanted him to be. He seemed to know everyone in Tirion. Everywhere he went he received hearty hand clasps, eager smiles, and a warm welcome. He was popular with everyone from the noblemen’s sons he hunted with to the street-sweeper he never failed to flip a gold coin to and share a greeting with as he passed. He was a born charmer, and blew into a room like a whirlwind of light and laughter and just, well, _fun_.

Fingon was, however, completely oblivious to the hints of Glorfindel’s abnormality, and convinced Glorfindel suffered from chronic shyness.

“What do you have next, little cousin?” 

“The footraces.” Glorfindel let loose a sigh at the prospect.

Fingon settled his hands on Glorfindel’s slumped shoulders. “Don’t let their size intimidate you. It does not matter if you leave them eating your dust or limp in last, you just give it everything you have, all right?”

Glorfindel bit his lip, but nodded. Unlike with the horserace, his youth was a definite disadvantage in the other competitions. It wasn’t so much his own embarrassment he feared, but the look in his mother’s eyes if he finished poorly. 

Fingon squeezed his shoulders before dropping his hands. A wicked grin overtook his face. “It’s the spear-throwing competition up next for me. Aegnor thinks this is his year, but I will show him what’s what, eh?” He winked. “Good luck, little cousin! Keep your chin up. In a few years you will wipe the field of all the so-call competition, so don’t let how you finish this year get to you.” He tossed Glorfindel a jaunty wave as he sauntered out of the stables.

Glorfindel let the fake confidence tumble from his shoulders as his cousin left. He didn’t know how one could not both admire and envy Fingon for his inexhaustible confidence. Glorfindel didn’t think there was anything Fingon didn’t think he could accomplish. He would call Fingon egotistical, but Fingon had good reason for his confidence. 

Glorfindel shook away the thoughts and crouched to pull off his sturdy riding boots. He pulled on the flat-soled running shoes he’d stashed in his horse’s stall. He didn’t have time for further preparation as the first rounds of the running contest would begin within the hour and he still needed to warm up his muscles. As his belly tightened with nerves, he was thankful he could get it over quickly and not have to wait hours to run like the Elves returning from past years’ competitions.

*

Irimë leaned back in her chair as she brought her wine goblet to her lips, sipping lazily. Aredhel sat on her left, a man intent on filling Celegorm Fëanorion’s place as her niece’s lover whispering in Aredhel’s ear. Aredhel only paid the man half a mind, most of her attention riveted upon the athletes as they performed their warm-up exercises. 

Aredhel would be participating in the woman’s competitions herself, and could often be heard complaining about the unfairness of segregating the competition by sex. She was adamant she could best any man, and indeed, gave Curufin a hefty blow to his pride when she out-rode him during their hunts. But those were happier times, and the sons of Fëanor would not come ridding in like arrogant bucks ready to clash heads with other men –their cousins especially—and prove the dominance of Fëanorions this time. 

Almost three years had passed since Fëanor took Finwë and his sons with him into exile, and Irimë was not the only one who felt the empty places where their presence yet lingered in Tirion. The city that had once dazzled so brilliantly seemed darker in the absence of the Fëanorions’ fire. And if she, who had no love for any of them but one, could admit as much, it was a yawning hole indeed. 

But as much as she missed Maglor’s place in her bed, she nursed her injured pride at the manner of his leaving:

She found Maglor in his chamber. Packing. His movements were brisk and decisive, his back a rod as he snapped out orders to the milling servants. When he saw her standing in his doorway, he sent the servants away for some privacy. 

He turned to her, unrepentance etched into the sharp angles of his face. “I accompany my father and brothers into banishment.” 

“No. I will not allow that.” The voice that came out of her mouth lacked the whirl of sugar she usually dusted her words with for Maglor. It was the voice she used on an obstinate Glorfindel; the one she’d used to tell her husband she was visiting her family for an indeterminable length of time; the one that brooked no argument. 

He’d started to turn away after his own announcement, but at her words, swung back to face her. Outrage painted his face. “Excuse me?”

She folded her mouth into a mold of sorrow. “You cannot leave me. I _need_ you, my love.”

“My father needs me,” his mouth did not soften for her, “or has it escaped your noticed that the Valar _banished_ him?”

She couldn’t hold back the accusing words. They burnt her throat black with the hate she bore, “He should not have—”

Maglor didn’t let her finish, “The Valar should not have stepped over Grandfather’s jurisdiction. Or is he not still king of the Noldor?”

Her hands balled. “My father would have done nothing as you well know!” 

His hand snapped through the air in a cutting gesture. “It matters not now. I am going with my father, and I will thank you not to order me about like your whipping boy, _Aunt_.”

Wherever he said, it had always been her forever running after him. Her heart so full of love she was ready to throw everything else away for its sake. But it had never been the same for him. He’d always kept a piece of himself back, preferring to deepen the bonds between his brothers and father than with the woman he once claimed to love. 

But he wouldn’t _really_ leave her. He had tried before, but he always came back. She was a part of him, and he of her. She may be the one forever chasing after him, but he always turned back for her, unable to walk away.

“Maglor, you cannot just leave—”

“I think you will find that I can.” His jaw flexed, teeth grinding together. 

“You said you loved me!” Her voice lashed out. 

A fire lit in his eyes, and his words pushed through the grooves of his teeth with bite marks, “You are _suffocating_ me. Your selfishness, your pride, your distained for those you think yourself so far above! My own family most of all!” 

“What of _your_ pride, Maglor Fëanorion! What of _your_ selfishness in leaving me here alone when I need you! You said you loved me, but I would never know from the way you treat me! How easily disposable I am to you!”

“No, not this time.” He took a step away from her. “You do not get to make this all about _you_ and what _you_ want. You do not get to _manipulate_ me!”

He was leaving her. He was _leaving_ her. But he could never _really_ leave (she wouldn’t let him). She had to play her role to perfection, but when she slipped on a smile, it over-stretched around the edges, “Maglor, really?” She shook her head at him. “I know I have my pride, we used to _joke_ of it. And if it is selfishness to want my lover by my side, then yes, I freely admit to that vice.”

“No, no,” his hands came up, palm out as if to ward off a blow, “you do not get to make me doubt now. I know what I have felt, and this is not _me_. You make me think things I never would have—”

“ _I_ make you, Maglor Fëanorion, do anything outside his desires?” She raised a brow. “Come now, Maglor, that is a reach and you know it. Wasn’t it just you, a moment ago, telling me I don’t get to order you around?”

“You play games, you manipulate—”

“When have I ever manipulated you? I love you, Maglor. I would never do something like that to you. All I have ever wanted, all I have ever striven for, was us to be happy together. Perhaps the love in my heart is too full at times, and I grow weary of waiting to be with you—”

“Stop. I will not let you _do this to me_. Not again. Not ever again. I have had enough!”

He was slipping away right before her eyes and her tongue abandoned her when she needed it most. “But you can’t leave me.” Denial was all she could summon.

He watched her plead without really pleading, her pride still a stone in her throat blocking the words she needed to say. Quickly, before he was gone like mist before her fingertips, she stepped forward, swallowing her pride enough to latch herself to his arm, his neck, his waist. “I love you.” She pressed kisses to his unresponsive lips, his face that tried to turn away from her. “I _love_ you.”

He pushed her away, hands lifting off her the moment he’d pushed her far enough back, as if even his skin wished to be rid of her touch. “Enough, Irimë,” the words held the weight of lead as if everything she was to him wrapped up in that one word. She didn’t like feeling more like a burden than a pleasure to anyone, but she _needed_ him so very, very badly. 

“Maglor, you are everything to me. I can’t _live_ without you! Maglor,” she grabbed for him, seizing his wrist as he tried to ward her off, “I can’t! I will _die_ —”

“I don’t believe that anymore, so you can save your false tears and play-acting.” His eyes were pure steel, all gentleness extinguished, his heart hardened against pleas and threats that once brought him back to her bed. “I am going with my father. When we return, I will speak with you. Once. You may say what you will at that meeting, but I do not believe you have it in you to change. Do not expect me to return to your bed. I tell you: it is over.”

She didn’t see why she had to change. If he just loved her again as he once did she’d have no need for manipulations. 

She refused to believe Maglor was lost to her. He would come back to her. He had to. And if his feet would not stop walking away, then she would _make_ them stop. He wasn’t allowed to leave her.

Upon the field the athletes were gathering for the dedication ceremony. Irimë’s gaze scanned the milling athletes, seeking out a head of gold among the overwhelming number of dark Noldor ones and the silver of the Teleri. 

There, hovering on the edges of the crowd, was her son. She suppressed a reflexive scowl at his perpetual timidness. She had no idea where he’d inherited it, none of her family was known for shyness. Ever her husband, despite his many failings, had never fluttered so about the edges of gatherings, forever reserved and uncertain when comforted with strangers, or anything bolder than a mouse.

When Tulkas rose from the Valar’s lofty perch to greet and celebrate the athletes, even Irimë was a touch awed by the Valar’s presence. It was easy to forget when one did not feel the weight of the Valar’s Power like a living thing day-in and day-out, exactly why so many Elves had taken the Valar as their gods. 

Her eyes slid over to her nephew Finrod who stood among the gathered athletes, curious to see what his reaction would be. Finrod’s face turned towards Tulkas, his back to the royal podium and stands packed with Elves. But from the stiffness of his spine, Irimë did not think Finrod was in awe of the Valar’s majesty, not even a little bit. 

After Tulkas welcomed the athletes and praised them for their courage in participating in his Games, the athletes stepped forward to offer signs of honor to the Valar if they so chose. The wealthiest of the contestants called forth servants to fetch boxes of jewels and other valuables they laid at the Valar’s feet. Others not so fortunate left wine and fruits from their fields. Still others, enamored with the Valar’s glory, swore their daughters to Vairë’s service to become one of those poor, unfortunate girls who were doomed to work Vairë’s looms in chaste devotion, forsaking male love and the joys of motherhood. 

Not all the athletes offered sacrifices to the Valar. Finrod certainly did not. And the Teleri, if they gave anything, laid their gifts only at the Sea-gods’ feet. 

Tulkas held his Games once every five years, but even Irimë could see a marked decline in the number of gifts offered this Games in comparison to last. The seeds of doubt and suspicious were now deeply rooted in the Noldor, and they had grown either too disillusioned with Valinor, or too prideful in their own greatness to worship the Valar as they once had.

When the Gift Giving ceremony was over, the long anticipated sprint was finally upon them. It was the first of many footraces that would stretch over the month-long Games, but it was by far the most popular. More than one Elf had fallen into the vice of gambling over the race’s outcome.

Fingolfin turned to her as the competitor’s lined up, “Glorfindel stands a good two heads beneath the tallest, yet his height for his youth shows promise of the stature he will one day reach.” He nodded towards Glorfindel who stood dwarfed by the full-grown males about him. “I still hold that he should not have competed until he was older.”

Irimë waved the censure away. “He held his own in the horse races. I have faith he will do so in this event as well. He may be small, but it is more than the size of a body that determines success. He is a Finwëion. We have more heart than all the rest combined.” 

“That may well be, but he is still a child and should not have been put into this situation. The Games are not a playful competition between friends. I speak from experience when I tell you that some of the Champions take the Games very seriously. Too serious. The pressure can be extreme. I do not like to think of a child in such an environment.”

“You worry too much. He will be fine.”

Fingolfin mouth pursed, a dark look overtaking his face. But then her brother was often frowning these days so she gave his words little credit. 

The burden of kingship sat heavy between his brows. He felt the abandonment of their father even more sharply than Indis. Not to mention Fëanor’s absence that hung like a cold specter about his rule, a constant reminder of its cost.

The delicate gold weaving of their father’s crown lay with a cast of responsibility and regret upon Fingolfin’s head. The golden gem set in its center had lost some of its brilliance since its creator had gone so far away, as if it, like its wearer, yearned for Fëanor’s absent presence.

Irimë narrowed her eyes at the crown as if she could blame it for all the sharp edges and lonely angles she’d seen in Fingolfin since the banishment. “That is not Finwë’s old crown. Whatever happened to the one Father used to wear?” This new creation of Fëanor’s had only sat upon Finwë’s head a bare month before the banishment.

“Hmm?” Fingolfin reached up instinctively to adjust the masterfully wrought crown. “Fëanor made it for Father not long before the…incident.”

“I don’t like it.” Irimë decided.

Fingolfin’s adjusting hand turned into a caress, and Irimë’s lips tightened. “Fëanor was very proud of it. He said the jewel’s light was crafted from the hair of a Finwëion, but would not say which. Father was delighted at the thought, quite taken with it.”

Irimë studied the gem nestled with innocent beauty in the crown’s center. The gem had shown brilliantly upon Finwë’s brow when Fëanor set it upon his father’s head. Its golden light rivaled the Silmarils with Fëanor’s hands upon it. It had never shone quite so luminously since.

“I thought Galadriel refused Fëanor’s request?” 

“I did.” Irimë’s head snapped about to meet the cool blue of Galadriel’s eyes. Her niece was seated a few rows further down the podium, but had turned at the sound of her name. “I gave no part of myself into Fëanor’s hands.”

The way Galadriel phased her denial sent Irimë’s eyebrows rising. It was almost….provocative. Yet Galadriel’s face was as dispassionate as ever, not even the hint of a smirk upon her lips one would expect if she had alluded to some secret joke. Galadriel was all seriousness, as if a hint of humor would have put a crink in that proud neck.

“Well, then,” Fingolfin mused, “I would say Celegorm, but his hair is not gold as such, perhaps Angrod or Aegnor, though I cannot see them donating hair to Fëanor unless in jest.”

“Quiet!” Aredhel cut off their investigation, “they are taking the line.” She leaned forward in her seat as the athletes stepped up, ready for Tulkas to give the signal. Even Eäwen and Aairë left off their gossiping on Fingolfin’s other side at Aredhel’s words. 

“There is your cousin Glorfindel, Idril. And see, your cousins Fingon, Angrod, and Aegnor there,” Elenwë pointed out the athletes to her daughter. “They will run in a little while too.”

Idril clapped her hands, “Oh! I hope my cousins win!”

Elenwë ducked her chin as heads turned at the child’s excited voice. Turgon laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder, giving her a fond smile. Elenwë blushed brighter at all the attention, and Irimë’s lip curled in derision. _Poicindis_ were such weak, pitiable creatures. To think, the woman couldn’t even handle speaking in pubic without turning into a puddle of embarrassment. 

Tulkas gave the signal and the runners were off. A runner with the silver hair of the Teleri took the early lead, another Teler close on his heels. The Teleri’s slender builds usually resulted in one of their race taking the victory in this event, but sometimes a Noldo could outstrip them, and then the Noldor spectators went crazy to see one of their own snatch the wreath crown. 

The Noldor dominated almost all other events as it was, but for the archery contest which the Teleri swept unfailingly. A rare Vanya would enter the horse races, but they almost never won. It wasn’t in the Vanyar’s nature to train their bodies and breed the competition and ambition that led the Noldor to dominate the Games so unquestionably. 

Irimë tracked her son’s progress with a sharp stab of disappointment to see him struggling along with a pack of lagging runners.

“Glorfindel is doing well for his age,” Fingolfin said. “When he reaches his majority, my son might have some competition in the heavier events. I know Fingon will feel Celegorm’s absence keenly in the wrestling and throwing competitions.”

“Don’t forget the others.” Aredhel said. “Amras and Amrod only participated in a few Games yet, but they showed promise of following their elder brothers’ lead. And Maedhros and Maglor used to compete in a few events, and always had a superb showing. Though the Games were never to Caranthir’s taste.” 

“You do not care to compete, Nephew?” Irimë asked Turgon.

He smiled, a small private one with the edges of bitterness. “No, I leave such things to Fingon.” 

Irimë blinked, surprised by what she thought was a note of petulance in her nephew’s voice, or perhaps it was jealousy. She did not know Fingolfin’s second son well, even after years in Tirion. Turgon and his small family were private people, and their names were rarely tossed about in court gossip.

Her attention snapped back to the ongoing race as it neared its finish and the watching Elves’ cheered on their favorites. Aredhel found her feet as well, bouncing on their balls as if she were about to tear down to the field and show these men how a footrace was meant to be run. Glorfindel struggled at the back of the pack, not quite last, but far from the two Teleri who battled it out for the win.

As Glorfindel practically stumbled over the finish line, Irimë had to look away. For all Fingolfin’s talk, Fingon had participated in his first Games before his majority, and she did not remember him having so poor a showing as her own son. She would not lie and say her pride was not stung as she watched Glorfindel collapse, heaving and sweaty, on the dirt track. 

“Our little cousin did well,” Aredhel turned away from the field to pick up her goblet and wet her mouth with the rich wine. Her potential lover, who Irimë thought couldn’t hold Aredhel’s interest for a fortnight and would never make it between her thighs, nodded along like a bobbing blue-jay to her words.

“Indeed he did.” Fingolfin flashed a proud smile at his nephew as the boy’s anxious eyes scanned the podium.

Why did Glorfindel have to be so obvious about his nervousness? Irimë wished he would learn to suppress his emotions better. It was not an enviable trait to have your political opponent able to read your thoughts like words from your eyes. 

Glorfindel’s gaze had found her, and she made an attempt at smiling, but she hadn’t been able to see anything but what she needed to fix in her son for some time. She wished things could be different, but that was a parent’s duty was it not? Too teach their children even if the lesson was difficult. Sometimes children needed hard love, not the sugary kind Elenwë dripped all over Idril, spoiling the girl. She had to remain strong, and complete this lengthy labor of fashioning Glorfindel into the man he needed to become.

*

The horse’s nose bumped against his shoulder as it trailed behind its melancholy rider. Glorfindel patted the velvet nose absentmindedly. His thoughts turned inward as the lonesome pair wandered the bank of a meadow brook.

He left the running fields directly after his race, thankful he was not expected to perform in another competition today. He refused to use the word ‘fled’ to describe his behavior, but it was close enough. 

He’d as good as lost. What was the buffer of a few places between him and utter humiliation? The look on his mother’s face…she had not needed words to tell him what he was: failure.

It wasn’t enough he couldn’t purge these filthy desires from his mind, did he have to fail in this too? Why couldn’t he be a better son, her eyes demanded. Why couldn’t he be more like Fingon?

Why couldn’t _she_ be more like Lady Elenwë? His mind snapped back. Long had he watched the lady with Idril. It set a deep ache in his chest to see the love pouring out of Elenwë’s eyes when she looked upon her daughter. Glorfindel would do _anything_ for such a look from his mother. She was the only parent he had left. 

Irimë had taken them to this city of the Noldor years ago on the excuse of a fleeting visit with family. They had never gone home. One month led to two, one excuse to stay replaced by another and then another. 

He missed his father; his quiet, steady company. He may not have ever had his father’s full attention, but he knew his father loved him even without a wreath of Champion on his brow. But then, his father didn’t know of his son’s perversion, so maybe even that distant love would crumble like an illusion between his fingertips if Glorfindel’s unnaturalness became known.

He kicked a stone, sending it plunking into the stream. He wished he never had to return. Maybe he could run away, live like the Wild Elves had before the Great Journey, scavenging for food, sleeping under the stars.

He plopped down in the long grass and wildflowers crowding the stream’s bank. Those were the fantasies of a child. His mother would send someone to fetch him if he wasn’t home by supper time, and he wasn’t a skilled enough woodsman to cover his tracks if someone came looking for him.

His hand skimmed over the bobbing flowers, admiring their lazy, waving heads. Hesitantly at first, anxious of his own daring, then boldly as the rebellious voices in his head urged him on, he plucked a mixture of wildflowers. With hands that had learned the art in happier, freer years, he wove a simple crown out of his gathering and settled it defiantly on his head. With deft fingertips he unlaced the braid binding his hair.

He scooted closer to the brook, searching for a natural pool where he might see his reflection. After a bit of searching, he found a place where a piece of driftwood had lodged itself between two rocks and created a pocket of deeper water. He peered down at his reflection, allowing his hands to adjust a flower here and there, curl a lock of hair about a wet fingertip to give it a little bounce until all was just right. 

He smiled, the first honest, full smile he’d wore in a long while. He looked quite pretty with the colorful accessory. 

He pinched some petals off one of the red heads, and rubbed them against his puckered lips. From his pocket, he fished out the stubby charcoal pencil he carried from his morning studies. He dipped its tip in the water and slowly drew around his eyes, giving a little flourish to their corners that made him laugh. 

He stared down at his finished work a long while. 

Then his hands ripped the flower crown from his hair, uncaring if he pulled some strands along with it. He plunged his hands into the cool water and splashed his face, fingers digging into his eyes ruthlessly and nails clawing as he attacked his face with a mad frenzy.

He panted when the bombardment of emotions finished its cleansing. His tunic was soaking. His hair, dark and dripping, plastered to his face. His eyes were red and he didn’t know if it was from the aggression of his attack or the tears that escaped while he committed violence against himself, trying to wipe away the face of filth he saw staring back at him. 

If only it was as easy to erase the moment of pure happiness he had felt as he fussed with the flower-crown and spread the petal juices over his lips. If only it was so easy to forget the boy he’d snipped up into pieces and shoved into the box of Unwanted and Unnatural in his head that neither his mother nor the world could love.


	11. Chapter 10

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 10

Finwë’s body lay motionless and cold upon the pyre. Celebrimbor stared at the shrouded from. He wanted to press his fingers into his eyes until he un-remembered the sight of Finwë’s body on the steps, blood everywhere, and what was left of his great-grandfather’s face… 

His uncles had arranged the body like one would decorate a feast, as if lilies, silver chains hung with diamonds, and wolf pelts could seep the life back into Finwë’s limbs and cure them of their unnatural stiffness.

Grandfather was far away in Tirion, so it was Maedhros who the duty of the Lighter fell to for Finwë’s pyre. There were other pyres stretching out in a long line. Finwë hadn’t been the only casualty of the Darkness. All of their scattered people who’d managed to find their way out of the Darkness stood in silent witness at their king’s pyre.

Maedhros held the torch in his hand. Its orange light cast strange shadows in the darkness. It crawled into the shadows in eyes, the paleness of cheeks still carrying the color of shock and terror. Maedhros threw the torch and the pyre, doused in oil, went up in a whoosh of flame. They stood in a terrible, crushing silence for hours until there was nothing left but charred wood and ashes. 

The horses were gone, driven mad by the Darkness, and couldn’t yet tolerate the touch of a rider. Not even Celegorm could sooth them into bearing him. They set out on foot for Tirion. 

When their solemn column passed out-of-sight of Formenos, Celebrimbor couldn’t bite back a relieved sigh. He made sure not to look back. Madness clung to the fir forests climbing up to the tall ramparts; it crept like fog into the cracks between stones. It had been so ever since Melkor had come like an anvil of terror out of the south and violated the very land.

He closed his eyes, but the memory would not be banished. He could hear the horses screaming as their eyes rolled white and they threw their riders, and what he had seen when he stumbled out of the forge…It was like some beast of darkness had sat its bulk down upon Foremost. Only the weight, the immensity reaching up up up to blot out the stars blew the mind apart to imagine any creature could be the source of that screeching vortex of Darkness. 

There had been screaming in his head, high and terrified, and it took a long while to realize it was _him_ making the sound of a gutted animal. He hadn’t run away. He hadn’t been able. He’d crawled like a beast on hands and knees, all thoughts of honor and bravery and family stripped from his mind until only the terror and the animalistic instinct to runrunrunrunrun was left.

Celebrimbor pulled his cloak more tightly about his shoulders, wishing the memory did not still have the power to terrorize him like the icy breath of Death upon his neck. 

His eyes wandered to his father who ran ahead. That proud spine was bent now. Curufin curled into the heavy fur of his cloak as if by surrendering his pride he might forgo what lay ahead. None wished to be the one bearing the news of Finwë’s death to Fëanor, so they had gone together to carry tidings that would be like the fall of an axe upon one they all loved.

Feeling eyes upon him, he turned and saw Maglor watching him from where he ran at his side. With a jolt, Celebrimbor realized he nearly met his uncle’s eyes levelly. Maglor was not the tallest of Fëanor’s sons, but Celebrimbor had almost reached his height. Maglor’s lips cracked in a sad smile that sent an ache in his breast even more than tears would have. That was his uncle Maglor, always trying to impart hope to others. 

Celebrimbor found the strength to return the gesture, his own smile a brittle, wan thing, but still there. 

Maglor’s clear, golden voice shattered the Shadow they ran under, sweeping it away as if it bore no more power than a flurry of autumn leaves. The light in Maglor’s voice shouted a challenge to the Dark, daring it to spoil _this_ love. For all its Power, the song was sorrowful, a lament for what they had lost even as it defied the shade of Melkor.

One by one his uncles raised their voices to twine with Maglor’s until the song rang with the strength of many. Celebrimbor joined as well, though he was no great singer, yet in that moment it hardly mattered. The song was about hope, loss, and love. It was about family. 

Washed in the sound of his uncles’ voices, Celebrimbor believed they would defeat this enemy too –grief—though they had never faced its like before. Let it not be said a Fëanorion ever turned back from the road no matter how hard or dark the climb.

*

Darkness had crept like a hungry wolf into the Elves’ bed. Glorfindel had felt the ghost of its breath on his nape, the saliva from its fangs pooling on his hand. Its jaws had eaten the Light. 

The world groaned like a woman in her labor pains under the insatiable appetite of the Darkness. Only the Valar’s mountain escaped the Darkness’ devouring.

Glorfindel had shut the tent flaps and lit the lantern, though its meager light could not perpetrate the illusion that nothing had changed. The Tree light would have been crawling in through the tent flaps and cracks, even the thickness of the canvass would have lightened with Laurelin or Telperion licking against it. The shadows would not have hidden the demons of half-remembered dreams and old tales. 

He fixed a glare on one particular shadow trying to frightened him with imaginations, and put a little more strength into his song. He gave the shadow his back to show it he did not fear, and picked up his knife again. His voice only rose a little above a whisper as he cut the excess fletch from his new arrows, but it was enough to give him courage.

When he’d been young, his mother had stepped outside of the Vanyar’s customs for raising a child, and hired tutors in the arts for him. The family was to be a Vanya child’s only teachers until they reached an age of apprenticeship, but a Noldo child of Glorfindel’s birth would have had a pack of tutors. The arrangement had not lasted a month, and it wasn’t even the gossips that never failed to stiffed his mother’s back and thrust her chin up that had her sending the tutors away. It was Glorfindel’s inadequacies.

The problem had come to a head with his music tutor, but his mother told him after that she had observed his lack of natural skill in the other arts as well. Glorfindel used to run to his music lesions, unable to wait the length of a walk for them to begin. His tutor had dotted on him, which his mother told him later was the root of the tutor’s dishonesty; he had wanted to see something in Glorfindel that was not there. 

The tutor and he prepared a presentation for his parents. His tutor promised him they would be pleased, for Glorfindel had a voice fair as singing stars. His tutor often told him so, praising him, and filling him with glowing joy. It had been a lie, but he did not blame the tutor for leading him on. The tutor’s only crime was being overly kind.

Father had been called away on the Valar’s business the evening of Glorfindel’s performance so it was only his mother there to hear him, only his mother to hear his tutor shower down praises on him and paint a bright future in the Musician’s Guild (‘A voice fair enough to sing before Manwë himself, with some polishing. Truly Lady Irimë, your son has a wondrous talent.’)

There had been a look of what Glorfindel had thought fear on his mother’s face, but no, it had only been disappointment with him and displeasure with the tutor’s well-meant words that only hid the lie behind. His mother dismissed his music tutor and all the others the very next day. Glorfindel had been inconsolable, crying in his room, when his mother came to him and explained that the tutor had lied to him. His future held no musician’s path in it, for, while his voice did not assault the ears, it was below average. In fact, it would be better for him to sing only to himself from now on lest his attempts to carry a tune upset his father in his work.

A scratching at the tent’s entrance had him setting aside his work, and rising. “Enter.”

The tent flap pulled aside, and his father, shinning with the light of the divine, ducked inside. Glorfindel did not move immediately to greet him. His father held his gaze, studying him back. They had not met in five years. Not since his mother took him from their mountain home.

Wisps of his father’s curls, usually so neatly pulled back in braids, teased free to frame his face. The curls’ gold lay bright against the fair brown of skin, a few shades deeper than the golden hair. His father’s fine robes, still carrying the shine of the Valar’s presence even as his skin and hair did, had the dirt of travel stained into their hem. The Noldor’s encampment upon Taniquetil’s foot lay some miles below the Vanyar’s city. 

The brightness of his father’s shine betrayed his location since the world re-made itself into one of darkness. He had been sitting at the feet of the Valar. 

To a Vanya, it was a matter of pride and status how brightly their clothing and bodies glowed with the dust of the divine. The Valar shed particles of themselves; their full essence not able to fit inside the bodies they had fashioned for themselves. So parts of them danced in the air about them, like curling snakes of light, or floated in flakes of colors as varied as a rainbow down on the Elves clustered at their feet. 

His father made the first move, covering the distance between them with slow, gliding steps. He put his arms about him, drawing him against a chest Glorfindel had once fit against but now felt too awkward and jagged to sink into. 

Glorfindel’s arms hung limp at his side. Once he would have known how to hug back, once he would have wanted to. Now he endured.

His nose filled with the scent of gods. The touch of his father’s robe wearing the memory of the Valar brushed against his skin with the danger of a hurricane, the softness of summer rain, and the cleansing breath of a mountain top.

“I missed you, son,” his father kissed his brow.

Glorfindel’s breath caught in the back of his throat. He bit his lip to keep the tears from leaking out. He had to pull away from arms that were not home but held him so gently and folded the false promise of love about him. His father wouldn’t have held him like this, wouldn’t have touched him (filthy, filthy boy), if he’d known the depravity Glorfindel harbored. But Glorfindel would not cry. He would not be weak, displaying his emotions like a loose woman her assets. 

He was too old for the longings his father’s arms stirred in him. He had to pull his spine straight, remember the calluses on his hands were from the skill he’d earned with bow and spear, and a sword in secret training sessions. He was no child to cry over hugs.

(He wanted to go home. He wanted Father to scoop him up, though he was far too old to ride on Father’s back, carry him home and put everything back to the way it had once been. But these were the wants of a child, a coward’s feeble heart, so he scorned them.)

He seized the safe wrist of distance, and put it between his father and himself. He used the excuse of pouring them wine to turn his back and re-fit the mask of control over his face. “Mother is visiting with Queen Indis, Father. I shall call her for you.”

“I met Lady Aairë on my way. She pointed your tent out to me, and went to fetch your mother.” His father perched on one of the couches with the grace of wading bird. 

Silence fell, thick with the span of years. Glorfindel brought his father a wine glass, and his father tilted him a nod of thanks. They sipped their wine, flicking glances at each other, and then away. 

His father cleared his throat. “I did not realize…your Birthing Day passed only weeks ago. That would make you—”

“Fifteen.”

“Yes.” His father held his gaze upon him. Glorfindel looked at the design of white gems sewn into his father’s collar.

His mother stepped into the tent like the cut of a reaper’s scythe through the awkwardness. She did not bring safety, but she was a person they were both more familiar dealing with. 

She walked with that firm, decisive step of hers, as if she’d never known a doubt in her life. She looked a queen with her hair pulled back in a fist of gold veined with rubies and diamonds. From the top of the clasp jutted a triangle of white feathers cut like an arrow’s fletching, sturdy, spines straight as a king’s.

“Husband,” she greeted curtly, “what business brings you down from the Valar’s thrones?”

“Irimë,” his father rose to meet his wife on a more level playing field, but it was not for the purpose of clashing wits with her, only to delay his inevitable retreat. 

Arguments had not been unheard of in Glorfindel’s childhood, but most displeasure had been on his mother’s side finding something to criticize his father for, and his father retreating into his scrolls and Valar worship to escape her sharp, never-satisfied tongue. His mother demanded perfection from herself and others, and his father could no more meet those standards than Glorfindel. 

“I came to ask you to return to Valmar with me. It will be safer there, with the Valar, and you have been away from our home long enough.”

Irimë’s eyebrow rose, before she swept passed her husband to stand beside Glorfindel. “We shall not be retuning.”

His father’s generous mouth flattened. “Very well, that is your choice. But Glorfindel is my son, and I want him safe, with me, in Valmar.”

Irimë’s hand dropped onto Glorfindel’s shoulder, and her voice arched cool and smooth as a marble gateway. “A son you have not seen in five years. No. It is I who raised Glorfindel, and you who chose your love for the Valar over him. As you always have. You are welcome to your gods; I will be keeping my son.”

His father stepped to Glorfindel, laying a hand on his empty shoulder, and argued one more time for him, turning his words at Glorfindel rather than Irimë. His mother’s hand curled into his other shoulder like a crow’s claw. 

His father protested, but not enough. Not enough. Glorfindel chose his mother. At least with her he knew he may never make her love him again, but she would not forsake him for what he was. He couldn’t look into his father’s face after the words hit the air. His father’s hand slipped from his shoulder like guilt.

And then his father said something Glorfindel had not expected, thinking his father would blame, possibly hate him. “I lost any right to influence your choices long ago. So be it. You shall go with your mother, and I hope you find happiness with her. I will not pretend I understand your choice, you have become as much a stranger to me as Irimë, but I have no one to blame but myself.” 

His father turned away, just as Glorfindel had opened his mouth in confusion and a longing for something he’d thought, for a moment, he saw reflected in his father’s face. But his father was already lost, the tent flap falling back over his retreat. He’d not waited for his son’s reply.


	12. Chapter 11

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 11

The air carried the scent of beasts. In the deep shadows between the trees, where the white light of the Fëanorion Lamps did not pierce, bodies moved. 

Fingon patrolled beside Glorfindel, steps soft as a rabbit’s pad, fingers cradling a notched arrow in his bowstring. The string was not pulled back to draw, but ready should the beasts drawn too close to the Noldor’s camp. 

Light glinted off the reflective eyes of a mountain cat crouched low in the grass. Birds covered the branches of the trees nearest the light in flocks. A moose walked boldly out of the tree shadows and into the light, its antlers a proud crown of shedding velvet. The beasts of the forest had been drawn to the light in a world of darkness.

Glorfindel’s hand tightened about his spear, and he cast a glance back at the rows of tents dipping down into an old glacier’s haunt. The camp climbed from the scooped valley up the slopes of the mountain. The Valar’s city twinkled like a star some miles above. The light shed from the Valar’s forms gave false comfort to the Vanyar who’d gathered close to their gods. 

The Noldor had relied on the works of their hands in a darkened world. The Fëanorion Lamps followed the paths of the tent rows, one set at every intersection. The Noldor’s settlement stretched for miles, and pockets of darkness punched holes where one Lamp’s light ended and another began. There weren’t enough Lamps to banish the darkness, but no Noldor had chosen a seat at the Valar’s feet over facing it.

One of the Elves of another patrol let loose his arrow, taking the moose in the eye. The moose’s legs folded under it, heavy body hitting the ground before it breached the outer-ring of the Noldor’s camp. Fingon had not taken his eyes off the mountain lion. 

Glorfindel’s head swung back around at the sound of rustling grass. The lion crept forward, slender shoulder bones flushing against its back like the sharp fins of a flying fish. Its eyes, shinning in the darkness, were fixed on the moose’s carcass. The scent of blood rode the air like the brine of the ocean, overwhelming all others.

The lion sprang. Fingon’s arrow took it in the heart, piercing its forward momentum before Glorfindel’s arm completed its throw. Glorfindel’s spear hit the lion in the chest, but it was already dead.

Fingon did not whoop over his kill, or turn to slap Glorfindel on the back with a jaunty word; such actions were meant for a hunting kill made under the light, not a kill for the protection of their people under a cloud of night.

Glorfindel helped Fingon drag the lion’s body closer in to the rows of tents, before continuing their patrol. The lion and moose’s bodies would be harvested, every scrap of meat scraped from the bones. They lived in a world of unanswered questions and uncertainty. Any potential food could not be left to go to waste.

Time had become a slippery thing with only the stars to mark it, so the patrolling sentries had developed their own method of marking a change in shift. One circle about the Noldor’s camp, and a sentry pair were relieved. Fingon and Glorfindel shared only a handful of words during the remainder of their patrol. Most of their thoughts were communicated with hand signals and the language of body. 

Manwë had spoken to the Noldor with pretty words of safety and trusting the Valar for protection. But Fingolfin had arranged his own patrols to guard their people from the darkness and whatever fell thing had brought it into their land under the Valar’s watch. The Noldor trusted the steel swords they’d forged, and the strength of their own arms. 

Their patrol complete, Fingon lead the way back to the circle of tents their family had set up in what seemed a lifetime ago but was only scant weeks when they came with their people for the Valar’s feast. But that was before the light went out of the world.

“You did well today, little cousin. Your heart did not falter.”

Glorfindel kept his eyes ahead, not flicking a glance up at his cousin, but his chest felt tight, his hungry heart swelling at the praise. “I do not fear the beasts of the land.”

Fingon looped his bow over a shoulder, and put an arm about Glorfindel. “No, I did not think you did.” His quiet voice drew Glorfindel’s eyes up. Fingon’s mouth curved in a half-smile, a touch of age in the skin about his eyes, the beginnings of wisdom. “But it is not the beasts we have spent all our lives living beside to fear, Glorfindel. It is the darkness an invader has poured over our land like poison.”

Glorfindel held Fingon’s eyes, not speaking, for he could not say he was without fear of the darkness.

Fingon squeezed his shoulder before releasing him. “It is all right. We are all afraid. But we will keep on venturing out into the darkness, protecting our people, going down into the fields to gather our crops, and our smithies to retrieve our swords and shields. We are the Noldor, and we conquer our fears.”

They reached the circle of tents the House of Finwë had erected, and Fingon followed him into the one Glorfindel shared with his mother. He let out a breath he’d been holding when he found her absent, and set about making his cousin feel welcome. He poured them wine and slid covert glances at Fingon’s strong back as his cousin walked a lazy circle about the tent. 

His mind ran blank of ways to keep Fingon here, alone, with him a few more moments. Time spent with Fingon outside the eyes of others, just the two of them alone in a place of privacy, were rare. He should not long for such moments as these like he did, but he couldn’t help himself.

He held out a wine glass for Fingon, and Fingon took it with a smile. He hid behind his own wine glass, unable to take his eyes off Fingon as his cousin took an absent-minded sip and set his bow down on the lightly-made table, shucking off his quiver after.

“You know, I think I mentioned this before,” Fingon mused as his free hand drifted to the buckle of his sword belt, beginning to loosen it. “But your mother hauled a ridiculous amount of finery up a mountain side for what should have been a two week stay for the festival.”

Glorfindel’s eyes flickered off Fingon’s hand working the belt. They met a plush carpet, a collapsible settee draped with furs, and more chairs and cushions beyond. This was only the public quarter of the tent. “I know.”

Fingon laughed, pulling the last of his belt’s tongue free of the buckle, and rested his sword against the table. “Don’t sound so morose about it! I would not want to be the servants carting all this up here, but we ought to enjoy the fruits of their hard labor.” 

Fingon downed the rest of his wine, and threw himself, sprawling, atop the settee. He arched his back, bringing his arms about in a lazy circle to drape over the settee. “I swear this thing is more comfortable than my bed back in Tirion.” Fingon lifted lazy eyes to him, a smile as relaxed as one sated from good sex on his mouth.

Glorfindel dropped his eyes, hands falling to the hem of his tunic poking out from under his leather hunting jerkin.

“Ah, don’t clam up now, little cousin, we were just starting to have a little fun.” Glorfindel couldn’t raise his eyes at Fingon’s teasing. His blood pooled low in his belly, cheek flushing. No matter how hard he tried to be good and clean, he always fell to temptation.

“Come here.” Glorfindel looked up to see Fingon holding out a hand for him, Fingon having thrown his feet back onto the floor and sat up. 

Fingon wore a soft smile now, face honest and good like his heart. His hair still spilled about his shoulders in braids woven with gold, and his eyes still laughed a blue as clear and bright as a mountain lake. Glorfindel’s eyes clung to the line of his jaw and mouth, but the sensuality in every bone in Fingon’s body that had made Glorfindel blush and his sex swell, had released its hold upon Fingon, returning him to a man Glorfindel could almost (almost) pretend he saw only a mentor, a cousin, in.

He approached on legs only shaking a little like a jellyfish’s arms. He stopped just within arm’s reach, not daring to cover any more inches lest the scent of Fingon, purely male, undid him. He must be careful, so carful. Fingon could never know.

Fingon had other ideas though, and reached out to yank Glorfindel another step closer before Glorfindel could shy away. “None of that,” Fingon grinned, and his fingers found the lacings on Glorfindel’s jerkin. “Let me help you, and then you are for bed, young warrior!”

Glorfindel shifted his weight, unsure how to stand. His fingers fumbled the laces on his other side. Fingon’s face hovered so close, his scent so heady. Glorfindel’s head spun. Fingon had finished unlacing one side while Glorfindel’s fingers still stumbled over the first tie.

Fingon turned Glorfindel’s body, angling the unlaced side to him. Glorfindel’s face heated as his fingers dropped, shaking, from the evidence of his ineptitude. But Fingon did not laugh, though it would have been a kind, teasing laughter (Fingon was never cruel). 

Fingon’s hands closed around Glorfindel’s embarrassed, trembling ones. Fingon’s mouth wore that line of seriousness it had adopted since the world unmade itself into a world of night. The carefree smiles were still there, tucked into the corners of his mouth, unbanshable, but Fingon had shed the air of careless joviality he’d wore like a second skin since Glorfindel had first met him five years ago.

“It is all right, Glorfindel,” Fingon squeezed his hands gently. “You performed well on the patrol, but if you do not wish to come out with me again there will be no shame for that choice, do you understand? You have nothing to be ashamed of to have known fear.” Fingon found his smile, pulling it out for Glorfindel. “How many other fourteen-year-olds can say they braved the Dark, and held their own beside Fingon the winner of so many Championships I have forgotten the count?” Fingon winked.

A smile broke through, taking Glorfindel’s mouth against his will. Fingon was always like this. He smashed through all the barriers Glorfindel build against him, against everyone. Glorfindel couldn’t keep him out. 

Not willing to let Fingon’s purposeful-slip slide, Glorfindel corrected, “Fifteen.”

“Ah, I had forgotten in all the excitement.” Glorfindel didn’t believe that for a moment. He’d been fifteen for over a month now, and no amount of dark invaders would have pushed that fact out of Fingon’s head after all the fuss his cousin had made over his Birthing Day celebrations back in Tirion.

He drew his hands from Fingon’s, needing to keep a certain distance. Draw too close, and he’d succumb to the tempting lies of a thousand dreams he fought and fought and fought, but never stopped visiting him in the night. 

He used words to put further distance between them. He’d learned how this was done from his mother. He arched his voice like the aloof, vaulted ceilings of the mansion his mother called their home in Tirion. “You need not worry. I am not such a child I would be frightened off by a single mountain lion. And it is not as if I have not been patrolling with you since you arranged the perimeter with Uncle Fingolfin. I will be fine.”

Fingon studied him in that stealthy way of his behind a smile, as if he thought Glorfindel would scare if looked at too closely. “You are a tough one, I know that. But you are still young. If you need time before returning to patrolling—”

“I don’t.” Glorfindel held Fingon’s eyes evenly. It wasn’t any darkness or crouching beasts that had set a tremble in his bones. It was himself he feared. He kept so much locked away, stuffed down in the dark where it could never reach the light (please, please, don’t let anyone see). He lived every moment in fear of discovery.

Fingon sighed, shaking his head, mouth wearing a fond smile. “Stubborn as well as tough. All right, I give in. I will come fetch you tomorrow for our patrol. Now let’s get you to bed.” Fingon reached for the lacing again.

“I am not a child to tuck into bed,” Glorfindel grossed, but didn’t pull away from Fingon’s touch. He hid behind his words, the gruffness in his voice, but inside he longed for this. Not only Fingon’s hands upon him, but the care in Fingon’s eyes, and yes, even the idea of being tucked a-bed like a tot.

“I don’t trust you to put yourself to bed. Knowing you, you will stay up long after your eyes start burning for a pillow just to prove you can.” Fingon grinned up at him as his fingers loosed the last of the lacings.

Fingon scooted him back a bit and stood to help him pull the jerkin up over his shoulders. The leather sleeves stuck to his tunic and undershirt, pulling them up with it. Fingon laughed as he tossed the jerkin aside, and watched Glorfindel struggle with a face-full of tangled clothing all twisted up around his elbows.

Fingon had mercy on him, and helped him free himself. He slid the undershirt down first, his knuckles skimming against the bare skin of Glorfindel’s sides on the way down, before smoothing out the tunic over it.

Glorfindel forgot how to breathe with Fingon standing so close, smiling down at him, and his cousin’s hands resting with ease upon his hips. His belly flipped, breath coming in all at once and sending his head spinning. Fingon smiled at him with softens in its curves. Did Fingon feel something for…?

He was an idiot. A disgusting idiot whose sex hardened over a brush of knuckles and a smile. Why couldn’t he stop these dirty thoughts from winning every time? Why was he so weak?

He stepped back, breaking the moment. Fingon’s hands slid from his hips, and he cursed himself for missing their weight. He’d been eating up moments like this for years, and it wasn’t only Fingon. Glorfindel was every bit of the filthy creature his mother was trying to cure him of, for he had these thoughts about every male who paid him crumbs of attention. Any touch lingering upon his shoulder, his back, any kind word or smile, and his mind would leap after it, spinning possibilities, hopes and dreams like a starving dog trailing after the scent of meat. 

His mother chose this moment to flip back the flap of the tent and step in. Her brow arched in a way that might have been regal on another’s face, but only looked critical on hers. The flap fell closed behind her, blocking out the sudden rush of light, and leaving only the soft glow of lanterns.

She inclined her head at Fingon. The lines about her mouth betrayed its fight against a pinch to Glorfindel’s practiced eyes. “Nephew, I trust you are well.”

Fingon spared Irimë only a glance as he bent to snag the shed jerkin from the floor. He put his back to her, tossing the jerkin on the settee before he went to retrieve his weapons. “Well enough.” 

He did not return the inquiry. Irimë’s mouth flattened, not holding back on her disapproval as he had not seen fit to follow even basic codes of decorum. When Fingon didn’t like someone they knew it. 

Fingon ignored Irimë entirely. He swung his quiver and bow over his shoulder and picked up his sword, before he returned to Glorfindel’s side to give his shoulder a squeeze. “See you tomorrow, little cousin. Keep your chin up. And get some sleep.”

Glorfindel’s smile came out reserved, a paltry thing next to the ones Fingon had stolen from him before his mother cast her shadow over them. His mother watched him with her sharp eyes. She always watched him. It was for his own good, he knew that, she only wished for his healing, but her eyes carried the weight of lead and the measurement of the sky. He would never reach her standards, forever falling short.

Fingon took his leave, and though the tent contained the same light it had a moment before, it seemed the darker for Fingon’s absence. The world had fallen into an endless night blacker than any night Glorfindel had ever known, but when Fingon walked beside him, smile on his mouth, a laugh at the ready, the darkness could not piece his heart for Fingon was the light.

He could not allow his gaze to linger on the spot Fingon had disappeared, not with his mother’s eyes on him. He turned away and found her looking down upon him with the naked disapproval she’d held back in Fingon’s presence. Her eyes ran slowly down his body to fix on his groin. His tunic could not entirely conceal his lingering arousal.

He dropped his eyes. He had given into his weak nature, and now she knew it.

“Go to the mirror.” His mother’s voice froze his insides. 

His joints dragged like metal cast upon a beach, turning to rust as the ocean’s salt ate it away. With slow steps, he made his way passed the cloth divider and into the tent’s sleeping quarter where the full-length mirror his mother had carted out of Tirion had been set up.

His mother followed him. “You know what to do.”

Glorfindel met his gaze in the mirror. The face looking back at him was a child’s. It looked close to tears, mouth all crumbled up. He would not be _weak_.

He set his chin, and breathed deep from his belly as he began to shed his clothing to stand naked before the mirror. He’d undergone this ritual a hundred times over the years. What was one more?

His mother came to stand behind him. She still stood a head taller, and used that height to look down on him, the planes of her face sharp and remote as a mountain’s top. She did not touch him with anything but her eyes, but they burned where they gorged into his groin, now gone flaccid.

“You became aroused in his presence again.”

“I did not mean to.” Glorfindel swallowed back any note of pleading. This wouldn’t be over until his mother decided it was, and nothing he said could end it.

“Didn’t you?” She slowly circled him, coming to stand just to the right so that her body did not block Glorfindel’s view of himself in the mirror. “All these years, and still you cling to these preventions. How many times must I show you what you have allowed yourself to become before you stop giving in to these unnatural desires?”

He kept his gaze straight ahead, meeting the one in the mirror. He looked into the face of a weak boy, and upon the body of one who wasn’t strong enough to resist the cravings of the flesh, the longing for the touch of male hands upon its skin. The boy staring back at him wore filth like a second skin. The way he stood, the way his bones were formed, all were ugly.

“It seems I must instruct you one more time,” his mother sighed, heavy as a sea fog. She placed herself at his back again, still not touching him, for he was ugly to her eyes as well, a disgusting boy. 

Her voice cut deep, to the bone. “Look at yourself. No,” she touched him for the first time, fingers pinching his chin when Glorfindel’s eyes stayed locked with his own, unable to find the strength to carry on with the ritual. “ _Look at yourself_.”

Glorfindel’s gaze lowered to rest on the treacherous flesh between his thighs.

“That is your enemy. That is your betrayer. Until you can gain control over these unnatural desires, you will be a slave to your lustings after men. Are you a Finwëion or not?” 

His eyes burned, but it would only get worse if he cried. He must weather this, as he always did. Until he became strong, this was his punishment.

“Are you stronger than these twisted lusts or are you akin to the beasts that lust would rule you? Do you hate this perversion inside of you, or are you nursing it? Tell me the truth!” Her hands dropped onto his shoulders, digging in. “What was the true reason I found you panting after Fingon, _again_ , like some bitch in heat? Have you been offering him favors?”

“No, Mother, I swear!” He shrank from the thought.

Her nails loosed on his skin. “Very well, I believe you. In this. But your thoughts have been impure.” He could find no defense, for they had been. Her mouth drew tight and hard. “And you expect me to believe you have been working to defeat this sickness in yourself, do you?”

“I have.” He cringed from the plea in his voice. His voice picked up steel, “I hate it too. I hate myself, I promise.”

“Glorfindel,” she stepped away from the mirror, signally an end to the ritual. Glorfindel took his first breath without it feeling like he breathed through gravel. “It is not yourself you must hate, it is this _filth_ inside you. You must work harder to defeat it. Some days I think you must not truly care if you are cured at all.”

“I want to be healed, Mother, I do.” Glorfindel shuffled away from the mirror and the ugly boy staring back. 

With the ritual’s completion, he was allowed to cover himself. He pulled on his leggings without looking at his mother, but felt her eyes upon him. He did not confide in her how hard it was to keep the perverse thoughts from coming. He did not speak of the temptations to fall, and all the times he’d given in. He’d learned better after all these years. To speak of such things would have only made her despise him more.

With his shirt and tunic pulled on, his mother crossed the distance to him again. She did not touch him (she avoided touching him whenever she could), but her eyes had softened. His heart yearned up, aching.

“My son, I only want to see you happy and healed.” Her voice still held him at a distance, but at least it did not draw blood. Almost, almost, he could image it soft and loving as it had once been when she’d held him close, kissing his cheeks, and called him her Golden Knight.

“I know, Mother. But I am trying, I am.” (Love me again, as you used to. Please, please love me). He sneered at the pathetic child crying out from the cavity of his chest, but not even his scorn could silence the longing.

“Oh, Glorfindel,” she shook her head at him, voice wearing such disappointment shame curled tight about his insides. “You do not fight hard enough. If you only stopped giving into to this filth, everything could be as it once was.” Her hand rose, not quite touching as it followed the curve of his cheek. “But perhaps I have been expecting too much of you. I thought you passed the years of childhood where such weaknesses are forgiven. I believed you a true Finwëion, with a will of steel, but I see I have been mistaken.”

The _need_ to not disappointed her suffocated him. “I will try harder, Mother.”

“Hmm.” Her hand dropped, and she surveyed him. “You _must_ try harder. You must defeat this perversion. You know what your fate will be if you do not.”

“ _What_ is going on here?” The deep voice sliced across his mother’s back like an axe fall. She could not conceal her flinch as she spun around.

“Fingolfin,” she gasped, eyes swinging between Fingolfin’s towering figure and Glorfindel’s frozen one. 

How long had Fingolfin been within the tent? How much had he heard? Glorfindel could not bear the humiliation of another knowing what passed between his mother and him.

“I asked you what was going on!” Fingolfin’s voice lashed like a whip.

Irimë’s spine straightened. “I was speaking with my son in our _private tent_. Now. If you are quite through with the intimidation act, let us sit and you may tell me of your business—”

Fingolfin’s eyes picked Irimë up in their blue that chilled like a glacial lake. He held her there until her words died on her tongue and her proud neck lost its carriage. He released her, looking away with the air of one who would not be looking back, for what his eyes passed over he considered not worth another glance.

His gaze came to rest on Glorfindel. It softened, but Glorfindel did not melt into it like sugar upon the tongue. “Glorfindel, child, go pack what belongings you wish to take with you. You will be coming with me.”

He did not move, but his delay in following his uncle’s direction was lost in his mother’s outrage. “Excuse me?”

Fingolfin did not spare Irimë a glance, keeping that soft gaze Glorfindel wanted to curse off his face (liar, liar, liar) fixed on him. “Glorfindel, leave us for a moment please. I need to speak with your mother.”

Glorfindel’s eyes narrowed, hands fisting. He cut his nails into the skin of his palms as he stalked passed his mother and Fingolfin. Fingolfin stood in the gap of the dividing curtain, and Glorfindel had to draw close enough to slip around him. Fingolfin tried to reach out, maybe to place a hand on his shoulder. Glorfindel didn’t want anything from Fingolfin, and darted around the reaching hand.

The dividing curtain fell shut behind him. Fingolfin may have implied Glorfindel should make himself scarce outside hearing distance, but Glorfindel didn’t leave. He stood in the middle of the tent, boots planted on his mother’s thick carpeting, and glared at the dividing curtain.

Fingolfin started up in a whisper, but not even the whisper was quiet enough to keep the words from Glorfindel’s ears. “He will not be staying with you. As you have proved yourself –time and again—unable to comprehend the damage you are inflicting upon your own son, I am removing him from your care.”

“Fingolfin,” his mother’s voice picked up a vulnerable tone, one she had never used with Glorfindel. “I know you find it hard to understand why I must do this, but I am trying to _help_ Glorfindel. I do this out of my love for him.”

“I will not discuss this with you again. I told you I would not permit you to continuing this, and now I see that you have lied to me, again and again, all along carrying out this...this _sickness_ in secret.”

“I had to! Why can you not see? If not purged these unnatural desires will ruin my son’s life! I did this for his own good!”

“What is _wrong_ with you? Are you willfully ignorant that you cannot understand this is the way he was born to be? There is no ‘purging’ of his desires. They cannot be changed anymore than the color of his hair. No. I am done discussing this with you. You will not listen. You will only pretend to change, and then turn back around and pick up where you left off. Too many chances have I given you, believing you could see the error of your ways. Slow was I to tear a child from its mother, but no more! It will not be a tearing but a saving. Glorfindel is coming with me, and he will never return to you.”

“No, I will not allow you to do this!” His mother tore aside the dividing curtain, and marched towards Glorfindel. Fingolfin followed, face like chiseled marble.

Irimë snatched up Glorfindel’s wrist, turning her chin up at Fingolfin. “You will not part me from my son.”

Fingolfin’s eyes hooded, posture adopting the arrogance of a prince sure of his right. He cast his gaze over Irimë, her stubborn jaw and uplifted head. “I will remove him if I wish, and for as long as I wish. Or have you forgotten who is Head of this family with Father’s absence?”

Irimë took a step forward, eyes ice. “And have you forgotten that I am a married woman and no longer under your jurisdiction! I do not answer to _you_ , Fingolfin! You dare come into my tent and start handing out orders, speaking as if you have some right to my son. I am not your servant! I am your sister, and I will thank you not to forget it!”

Fingolfin’s smile curled cold and hard. “Will you be returning to your husband’s house then, _Sister_? Unless you throw yourself upon your husband’s hand and flee back to the Vanyar, taking them as your own and Ingwë as your king, you cannot escape my judgment for I am the ruling prince of the Noldor. And I judge you unfit to care for your son.”

“You…” His mother’s nostrils flared, nails biting into Glorfindel’s wrist. “I will not let you get away with this. When Father returns, he will take you in hand! He will not allow such treatment of me to stand!”

Fingolfin’s voice curled like a shadow’s tail at dusk, “What makes you think he will not agree with me?”

Irimë released her grip on Glorfindel’s wrist, face taking on a superior cast, sure now of the ultimate victory. “Because he understands, as I do, that my son’s desires are _unnatural_ , and cannot be permitted to infest him. Father thinks as I do, and you know it, Fingolfin.”

Fingolfin’s face could have been cut from stone, so still and perfect was its mask. He let not even a flicker of his thoughts show. “We shall see. But for now, I am the ruling prince of the Noldor, and my word is law. Glorfindel is coming with me.”

Irimë worked her jaw, breast heaving. “You would take him from me? Tear him from the arms that held him in his infant years and the breast that nurtured him? You would risk his stunting without his mother’s love to feed his spirit?”

Fingolfin’s face was unmoved. “All you have fed him these last years is poison.”

Irimë’s hand flew to her heart, proud mouth folding up. “Fingolfin…” Her tongue tripped over the word. “Please. Brother. He is my son. For the love you bare me, do not do this thing.”

Fingolfin’s mouth turned down, but his eyes did not yield to her pleas. “You have brought this upon yourself. I wish you had listened to me, I do, but you did not. I cannot allow you to continue hurting him.”

“Brother. Please.” Irimë took a step towards him. “The Valar did not lift their ban upon Fëanor. Seven more years of his banishment stand, and you know Father will not return until he does. Would you steal my son from me for seven years? Would you deny me the ability to see him Come of Age? To grow into a man?”

For another moment Fingolfin’s face held onto its unyielding lines, but then a heavy sigh passed through his lips. “I may, _may_ , allow you to visit him in the future –under supervision—and subjected to immediate termination if I deem you unfit to spend even an hour in his presence, but only as long as Glorfindel wishes to receive you. That is all, Irimë. He will not be returning to your care.”

Irimë’s back faced Glorfindel as she’d approached Fingolfin; its line curved stiff, shoulders thrust back. Now she turned away from Fingolfin, and her face revealed itself to Glorfindel. His eyes flew over it, seeking, seeking. She looked at him a long moment, mouth a neutral line, eyes hiding the deeper thoughts. At least the look was not a disgusted one.

He startled when she closed the distance between them and took him into an embrace. It had been so long he’d forgotten what his mother’s arms felt like, so long he’d forgot how to react, and just stood there, frozen. 

Her arms felt like a stranger’s about him, not fitting quite right. His shoulders had grown too broad and him too tall. She seemed small against him, but in his eyes she had always towered like a statue encased in glass, far above his reach. How strange to find her body warm where it pressed against his chest, and her arms slender as willows across shoulders and arms that had been strengthened by years of training in the Athlete’s Field. 

Irimë turned her mouth into his ear and whispered for his hearing alone, “Do not forget what I told you, my son. Fingolfin takes you from me not out of love, but to satisfy his conscience. I will come to you soon, my son. Until then, keep yourself strong and your thoughts clean.”

His hands could have broken her slender white neck, or squeezed the life out of it. His arms could have held her body down as he pressed her face into a pillow and watched her thrash.

He broke from the embrace, heart thudding in his throat, belly churning. He tried to scrub the thoughts out of his head. Why had he thought them? What new sickness was this? This was his mother. He loved her and wanted only for her to love him back. And even if he had not, she was still a human being. What was happening to him that he could imagine, even for the flash of a moment, what it would be like to take her life into his hands and end it?

“Come, Glorfindel.” Fingolfin held his hand out to him.

Glorfindel’s legs took him to his uncle without thought. He did not want to think. He just wanted this all to be over and be left alone at last.

Fingolfin reached for his shoulder, but Glorfindel stepped back from the touch, and the hand dropped on air. Fingolfin’s eyes reached into Glorfindel’s face, but Glorfindel was not there to find. He was far away, buried deep, deep, deep, into a box without a key.

“Glorfindel, I am sorry you witnessed that. How are you feeling?” He did not answer. He wrapped his arms across his belly, and fixed his eyes on a point over Fingolfin’s shoulder. “All right,” Fingolfin whispered, nodding slowly. “I know this is a lot to take in at once. Will you pack your things, and come with me?”

He had not expected Fingolfin to ask him before just taking him away. His eyes flickered back to Fingolfin’s face. His arms tightened across his stomach to find the crease of concern (fake) between Fingolfin’s brows. 

He didn’t want to be saved from his mother. He only wanted her to love him again. And he didn’t need to be saved from the woman with a voice hard as nails and eyes that cut into all the diseased places inside him, seeking to clean him out. He could take care of himself.

He left Fingolfin’s side without another glance and ducked back into the sleeping quarter. As he gathered up a bag of anything he cared enough about to bring with him, he strained his ears for more whispers, but there were none.

He stared down into the belly of the leather bag a long moment. This was all he’d be taking with into an unknown future. Would he be living with his uncle Fingolfin? Doubtful. Fingolfin wouldn’t want to be burdened with him. Fingon? Glorfindel swallowed down the fluttering in his gut. Stop it. Fingon wouldn’t want to be burdened with him either.

He took a deep breath, and slung the bag over his shoulder before walking back into the public quarter of the tent. Fingolfin and Irimë sat across from each other on the overly-decadent chairs. Irimë stared at Fingolfin, mouth a hard line, while Fingolfin stared out at the room, gaze cool and radiating disinterest with every pore in his body.

Fingolfin looked over at his entrance, and the mask of the poised prince cracked enough to loose a smile. Glorfindel did not return it. 

Fingolfin stood and crossed to him. He did not try to touch him, which was for the best. Glorfindel would not have welcomed the pretence of care. 

“Come, Glorfindel.” Fingolfin led the way from the tent without a backwards glance at Irimë. 

Glorfindel paused to take one last look back at his mother. She met his eyes. He could not find love in her eyes. Looking at her left him feeling dirty and alone, but his skin starving for what had once been. (love me, love me, please).

Fingolfin awaited him on the tent flap’s other side. Glorfindel looked away, setting his eyes on the circle of tents around them making up the living spaces of the House of Finwë. Fingolfin’s own tent, which he shared with his two unmarried children and grandson, rose directly opposite Irimë’s, the whole width of the circle between them. Not an immense distance, but enough nothing that passed in one could be over-heard in the other lest it be shouted voices.

To the right of Fingolfin’s tent sat Turgon’s and his family’s. To the left was Queen Indis.’ Finarfin and his wife camped with the Teleri, but their children, cousins Glorfindel knew little of, had placed their tents with the Noldor, closing out the circle with their two tents, one for the married Angrod and another for the unmarried sons and daughter.

Fingolfin did not move to cross the grass washed in the white light of the Fëanorion Lamps. His stillness drew Glorfindel’s eyes to him again. He found Fingolfin already watching him.

“Glorfindel, I know this is not easy. Or rather, I do not know, as I have never experienced what you are going through right now. But I want you to know I am here for you. If you ever need me, for anything, I will be here.”

Glorfindel looked away, hand tightening on the strap of his bag.

His uncle said nothing more for a long moment under which the stars watched them with their brilliant, cold eyes. “Would you like to know what will happen to you now?”

Glorfindel shrugged.

“I will ask your cousin Turgon if he will care for you. He and his wife are good people who will love you as you ought to be loved. Elenwë will show you what a mother’s love is meant to feel like. I cannot raise you myself as my duties are too many in such times as these. But I do not think you would have wanted to come live me, would you?”

He slid a glance at Fingolfin out of the corner of his eye, but Fingolfin did not appear to be angered by that observation, true as it was. No, he did not want to be taken on as yet another duty by the Liar. But he wanted—it didn’t matter. He would be shuffled off like a sack of grain to Turgon. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need saviors. He could take care of himself.

“Is this arrangement suitable to you?”

His chest tightened. He didn’t look at Fingolfin. 

“Glorfindel,” Fingolfin tried to touch his shoulder again. Glorfindel jerked away. “Please, child, speak to me. I do not want to hurt you. You have been hurt by one who should have loved you unconditionally. I do not want to hurt you as well, but I do not know how to help you or what you need if you do not speak to me.”

Glorfindel spoke to the air, not turning to face the voice that sounded so sincere so _concerned_ (practiced liar). “It is fine.”

Fingolfin said nothing for a long moment in which Glorfindel felt those eyes on the side of his face. Then Fingolfin dropped on a breath, “Is it, child? Is it really?”

Glorfindel’s arm slipped over his stomach, holding himself. He would not turn to look into his uncle’s face lest he be taken in and believe, if only for a moment, that Fingolfin might care, might love him, just a little. When the truth reasserted itself, as it would, it would press with the agony of a branding iron into his heart.

Fingolfin sighed. “Well, let us take this one step at a time. For tonight you can stay with me, and Fingon and Guilin. We shall tackle anything more tomorrow. How does that sound?”

The band squeezing Glorfindel’s chest loosed its stranglehold. He found the strength to mumble, “All right,” to his boots with another shrug.


	13. Chapter 12

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 12

Idril played with her hoop and stick in the grass while Elenwë watched from her perch on the garden bench. Elenwë’s fingers birthed beauty in the thread and cloth spread over her knees, a soft smile on her mouth as Idril’s laugher rang out, her yellow hair flying behind her as she chased after the escaping hoop.

Glorfindel’s eyes slid back and back again to the pair. Elenwë looked up, catching his gaze, and gifted him one her gentle smiles Glorfindel secretly craved. He gathered it up, folding it like a cloth, and tucked it against his heart.

His mother’s voice at his side drew him away from the fantasy and back into the cold world of reality. Elenwë was not his mother, and any smiles she turned upon him were ones she would have given any child. He was nothing special.

“Have you been keeping yourself busy? It would not do to fall into idleness. Not in such times as these when doubts could prey upon you.” Irimë leaned closer, dropping her voice to conceal the words from Elenwë’s ears. “And while I love you, you have not the strength of will that others in our House possess.”

He weathered the criticism of his character. His mother said nothing he had not heard a hundred times before and knew in his heart for the truth. “Yes, Mother, I have been keeping busy. Fingon asked me to help him organize the guard schedule for the walls and sentries in the city. I have also been going on patrols with him out into the fields. Not all the crops have been harvested, and hunting parties are still venturing into the woods.”

His mother nodded curtly. The stone in his belly shifted, allowing him to breath. He’d pleased her. She turned a glance back at Elenwë and Idril. The garden’s lawn spanned between them, but the fountain at its middle was silent, so voices carried too easily for his mother’s liking. 

Trees ringed the lawn, rising at the benches’ backs, looming in a world of long shadows, the darkness only held back by the light of white lamps. The work of Fëanor’s mind and hands had been their salvation. A world of torches (never quite powerful enough to light the night) would have been their fate without the Fëanorion Lamps. 

The Lamps had been strung through the city streets after the Noldor returned from the mountain with the news of King Finwë’s murder. What Lamps were not spent lighting the streets were carried from room to room, kept close. There were not enough Lamps. Though the smithies had fired day and night after the Tree’s were slain, Fëanor leading the smiths in the making of more and more (never enough light), as the world stood still awaiting news, any news. 

His mother leaned close, slipping her secret words in-between louder inquires about his time on the patrols. “Have you been holding to the path of healing I set out for you, my son?”

His gaze strayed to the dead fountain. The water lay still in the pool at its base, the valves closed, shutting off the cycle of water flowing from the marble lady’s tipped jug. He pulled the cloak tighter about his shoulders, a shiver running through him. He had never known cold like the cold of this darkness. Fingon teased him when he complained about the cold, saying it was nothing to the cold of the Northern forests, before he’d put his arm around Glorfindel’s shoulders and told him he’d grow used to it soon enough, it was just his southern, Tree-basking body adjusting.

“Yes, Mother.”

His mother asked another meaningless, pretty question about his day for the benefit of Elenwë’s listening ears, before slipping another out in a whisper. “Have you had any more unclean dreams since last we met?”

Fingolfin permitted Irimë to visit once a week, as Glorfindel had said nothing to discourage the visits. Maybe, if he could be stronger, if he could purge these twisted desires at last, his mother might love him again.

But since his mother’s last visit, Glorfindel had woken from dreams of Fingon three times. _Weak_. But he met his mother’s eyes and lied because he wanted her to give him her shadow smile. “No, Mother. I…it has been easier after everything that has happened. I think I am getting stronger.”

His mother did not give him a shadow smile, the one that he could almost pretend meant he’d found approval in her eyes. “Do not lie. Tell me the truth.” 

Her voice cut, like the slice of a scalpel. She only sought to remove the decay from his flesh. If he were not so weak, she would not have to hurt him so.

He dropped his eyes. “I am sorry, Mother. I did not mean to have the dreams. I…I did not touch myself after.” His gaze rose, grasping hers with earnestness. “I swear it.”

“I believe you. And I forgive you for failing to stop the dreams. You resisted the greater temptation, and that is a mark of progress.” Her hand dropped into the bench beside his, almost touching. It was enough. It would have to be. (Then why did it still hurt so much? And why did her forgiveness not lift his heart, only sink him deeper?).

“Listen to what you must do.” His mother’s eyes held him, scorching the landscape of his face. She would not be disobeyed. “You will continue my lessons alone for now. I am working on Fingolfin; it cannot be long now before he allows me to see you more often and for longer stretches of time. This business of a mere hour once a week’s turning is a punitive flexing of his power. I shall not stand for it. You must remain strong and faithful to the path of healing I have set you upon. When you feel the weakness of your character threatening to defeat you, think of me, of my words. I shall be with you, always.”

Idril’s cry, more of shock than pain, broke his mother’s gaze from his face. Idril had taken a tumble as she herded her hoop across the grass. Elenwë set aside her needlework to kneel beside Idril. She took her daughter’s hands in hers, turning them over to inspect them for cuts. Idril sniffled, complaining of the pain though no blood stained her soft hands. Elenwë brought the little palms up to her lips, dropping a kiss into both. 

“There, all better, sweetheart. Would you like to sit with me, or are you ready to play again?”

Idril jumped up, injury forgotten as she snatched up her stick and hoop. “I want to play, Mother!”

Elenwë smiled, rising from her crouch and taking her seat on the bench again.

Irimë sniffed. She dismissed the mother and child, turning her attention back on Glorfindel. “I will have your promise now, Glorfindel, to follow my instructions.”

He watched Elenwë’s gentle mouth curve up, eyes shining love upon her daughter.

“Well?”

His eyes turned back to his own mother. She met his gaze with a mouth tightened by impatience. Would she ever look upon with eyes shining as Elenwë’s? “I promise.”

His mother’s mouth released its displeasure, picking up the shadow of a smile. “That’s a good boy.” He tried to gather his mother’s smile up and press it to his heart, but there was not enough of it to grasp hold of. It slipped as insubstantial as shadows between his fingers.

Irimë’s allotted visiting time came to an end, and she took her leave with words he did not believe to Elenwë, and a swift, stiff embrace to him. She gave him one every leave-taking. He couldn’t be sure they were for him or for the eyes watching. The embraces did not grow more natural with frequency. He had learned to lift his arms, settling hands with the delicacy of holding ash upon her back, feeling her curls under his fingertips. She smelt like a mountain glade. No, she carried the scent of something cold like snow, but the flora scent worn over that was not that of a meadow’s wildflowers, but the heady one of roses. The kind of scent women acquired from a perfume.

He watched his mother’s skirts sweep from the garden, the Fëanorion Lamp she’d brought with her illuminating the way for her slippered feet. Elenwë stood beside him, watching her leave. He felt her eyes when they turned to take him into their gaze. He held his face fixed as a mask, just as his mother had taught him.

“You need only say the word, and she will never come again.”

He did not turn toward Elenwë, but away, putting his back to her. “I would like to go to my room now.”

“It is supper time, Glorfindel.”

He paused in his retreat. He must not be overly sullen or questions would be asked. He had been too withdrawn and moody during those first weeks after the…change. He had not been able to get a moment’s rest from the ‘concerned’ voices. 

“I am tired. May I be excused from table?”

Elenwë’s dress shifted about her legs as she closed the distance between them. He endured her small, delicate hand on his arm. He itched to brush it off him (he longed to tilt into it). “I am worried for you. After your mother’s visits you grow so quiet. And in the hours approaching her coming I see such tension in you. Please, believe me when I tell you Fingolfin would not allow her to see you if you say the word.”

He turned back to Elenwë on a slow twist of heel. He met her eyes with his own hidden ones (everything buried deep, deep, deep). “I thank you for the concern, Lady Elenwë, but it is not necessary. While I understand my uncle Fingolfin’s reasons for removing me from my mother’s care, she is still my mother. I do not wish to lose my relationship with her. And indeed, my uncle must feel the same, for he has permitted her these visits. He too understands the importance of a parent’s love.” 

He spoke with the voice he might discuss the weather, detached, as if speaking of a stranger. His mother had taught him how to hide, and since being taken from his mother he had been wearing nothing but masks. He lived among strangers, or as good as strangers for they knew not his heart, that diseased place inside him that if known would have had Elenwë’s hand recoiling from his skin. 

Elenwë did not know what he was. If she did, she would not look at him with softness in her eyes. If she did, she would not come knocking upon his bedroom door in the evening and asking if he needed anything as she came to perch on the edge of his bed and touch his shoulder with that gentle hand, speaking to him in that voice promising love (Lies. She would not speak to him thus is she knew him as his mother knew him).

This love, so close, almost within reach, was torture. It would not cover all of him, only the parts deemed _acceptable_. If Elenwë and Turgon knew the dreams he had of Fingon and Fëanor, and other men who had dropped kindness upon him or filled his sex with their beauty, they would not set a place at their table for him opposite their daughter. They would not have opened a room in their home for a filthy boy.

They were so kind to him, perhaps if they knew they would be like Fingolfin, dropping words of acceptance, but when it came to putting words to actions, passing him off to another or forgetting about him for years and years because he wasn’t the kind of boy worthy of remembering. He was the kind of boy to be hidden in the backroom, the kind to find another to bear the burden of, the shameful-secret kind. At least his mother had never turned him away. Her love had dried up and he wasn’t strong enough to earn it back, but at least she had never turned from him. He had her, even if he had nothing else.

Elenwë said nothing to stop him as he set off down the garden’s path. He had no Fëanorion Lamp of his own, but lanterns now lined the halls. He followed their path upon the floor until he came to his room. Turgon had the servants devise ways to set the lanterns into the walls, or hang from the ceiling. There had been no need for lanterns to lighten a corridor lit by Telperion’s silver light.

Closing the door behind him, he lit a sole candle. The protection of the city had occupied most of his time with Fingon, but he had caught enough tail-ends of conversations to hear the worry in voices when they spoke of rations. Candles and the lantern oil had to be as rationed as the food.

He left the candle on the table beside the bed, and crossed to the mirror. Its quality lacked nothing. It showed him his reflection without lies. An ugly, filthy boy stared back through the glass.

He took off his tunic first, letting it slide to the stones. The candlelight cast shadows onto the white undershirt, staining its pureness. He pulled it up slowly, closing his eyes and gathering his breath as it brushed over his face and through his hair on its path to the floor. He opened his eyes. The light gathered on the dark gold of his skin, tanned from hours under the Tree Light and not yet returned to the paleness of the skin peeking through the band of his leggings. 

His skin bore the mark of his grandmother Indis’ blood, though it was a far ways off from his father’s brown skin. And his hair, though golden and curled, lacked the texture of his father’s puff of curls. 

His hands rested for a long moment on the lacings of his leggings as his heart failed him like the feeble organ it was. But in the end he overcame. He unlaced them and bent to yank his boots off, before sliding the leggings from his hips. He kicked them off, leaving them in a tangled wad on the floor.

( _Look at yourself_ ).

He straightened and met his eyes in the mirror. He looked upon his nakedness. His eyes raked down every piece of this flesh that betrayed him again and again. His hands flattened against the planes of his stomach. With these hands he had touched himself, bringing himself to pleasure with the image of men behind his eyes. His fingers slipped up to touch the sinful plumpness of his lower lip. With this mouth he had gasped names as he pleasured himself. His hand dropped to his hipbone, fingers just brushing the hairs of his groin. He could not bring himself to touch himself lower. That place had been stained with too much shame to let his hand stray to it without the cover of blankets or the necessity of bodily needs.

( _That is your enemy. That is your betrayer. Until you can gain control over these unnatural desires, you will be a slave to your lustings after men. Are you a Finwëion or not?_ )

His hand fell from its perch to hang like a bird’s impotent wing at his side. “I am trying, Mother. I am trying.”

( _Are you stronger than these twisted lusts or are you akin to the beasts that lust would rule you?_ )

He closed his eyes, before Irimë’s eyes in his mind snapped them back open again. He must not hide from the truth of himself.

( _What was the true reason I found you panting after Fingon, _again_ , like some bitch in heat? Have you been offering him favors?_)

“No,” his voice broke on the whisper. 

He folded his arms across his stomach, and turned away. He couldn’t do this. He walked, naked, to the bed, and pulled back the cover to slide underneath, hiding himself from the judging eyes of the mirror, wishing he could walk away from her voice in his head.

He squeezed the tears back, lungs struggling to drawn breath, and curled into himself like a fetus in the womb. The disgust clogged his throat like vomit, curling in acidic coils deep into his gut. He wanted out. Out of this body that panted after men, out of this head that played back his mother’s words on an endless cycle, giving him no escape, not even a moment’s peace.

He _hated_. He dug his nails into his sides, curling his fingers around his back to bite into the flesh there too. He shook, biting his lip until he tasted blood, but could not stop the tears anymore than he’d been able to stop the dreams of men. 

A kneeing sound tore from his throat, and he punished himself for the helplessness and pain in that one note with nails dragging down his back, leaving long scratches.

The hate licked its fiery tongue down his spine, whispering with the voice of seduction. This hate was not for himself, but _her_. But he did not reach for it; he resisted. What little strength he had in him he used to battle the hate. 

He did not hate his mother; he only wanted her to love him. But she never would again. The sobs choked him, riding him, leaving him helpless before their power. 

She had broken his heart. There was no running from the truth, not here, alone when all the masks failed him. He would never be able to conquer these desires, and she would never love him again. He shoved his fist into his mouth and screamed until his throat cried out for mercy and his teeth had left the imprint of their shape into the backs of his knuckles.

She had broken his heart. He cried out with the anguish of years worth of doing anything, anything, she asked of him, anything to make her happy, anything to make her love him again. His heart had been shattered, and it wouldn’t be gluing itself back together again.


	14. Chapter 13

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 13

After Fëanor left Fingolfin crying, heart wounded, and so confused in a garden, Fingolfin secretly cried himself to sleep night after night, wishing his big brother would come back, and not understanding what he’d done to drive Fëanor away. Irimë crept into his bed one night, a doll clutched to her skinny chest. He hadn’t been able to hide the tears. 

Her white nightgown trimmed with lace, big blue eyes, and golden curls re-made her in the image of a child-goddess in the soft silver light. She curled her body about his. Her little face had taken on a serious cast as her fingers wiped the traces of the tears from his cheeks, and promised: “I’ll never leave you like _he_ did, Fin.” Her little mouth already twisted about everything Fëanor’s was. “I will never make you cry. I promise.”

Fingolfin held her back, even as he wished it was another making those promises to him. But Fëanor never would, so Fingolfin’s arms filled with his sister and his mouth with promises to love her forever.

Fingolfin saw his sister at times, passing in the palace’s halls, in the company of their mother or coming back from her visits with Glorfindel. He looked into the face of the woman who had once been his little sister, and found nothing he loved staring back. He had deceived himself for years into believing that little girl was still there, hidden somewhere in the face of a woman long grown into a stranger.

But until he’d heard it with his own ears, it had been inconceivable that she would return to destroying her son. He’d believed it ignorance moving her hand against her son, but had she truly seen the changes she’d wrought in Glorfindel all along and cared more for having her own way than loving her child? And even now, even _now_ , had she understood nothing?

Turgon had come to Fingolfin with Elenwë’s concerns for Glorfindel. She feared Irimë’s visits were unhealthy for him, though it seemed Irimë was on nothing but her best behavior. If only Fingolfin understood more of what Irimë had done to the child, but Glorfindel would no more speak of his mother than Irimë would reveal her crimes.

Fingolfin trusted Elenwë’s judgment. If her instincts told her something was amiss, then he would get to the bottom of it. Glorfindel had not opened up to Turgon or Elenwë, or even Fingon. Fingolfin had little hope of luck himself –he could hardly fail to pick up on the boy’s distrust, even dislike—but he would attempt regardless. 

He raised his hand and rapped his knuckles across Glorfindel’s door. Only silence met the knock for a long moment in which he debated the damage of walking in without permission, before Glorfindel called out: “Who is it?”

“Your uncle Fingolfin. I need to speak with you, Glorfindel.” The oak tree stretching broad arms across the door’s wood mocked him as only silence answered. 

Fingolfin turned a glance down the corridor, left and right. The lanterns revealed no one. He should have insisted Turgon or Elenwë come with him. They had believed Glorfindel would feel threatened with two adults asking for answers, but surely Glorfindel would feel all the more defensive with only Fingolfin, who he did not like, in the room with him.

A soft click swung his eyes back to the door. Glorfindel cracked it open, a slice of his face revealed to the lantern light. The room’s light backlit him, gathering in his hair and turning it into melted gold. 

Glorfindel’s mouth set in an unwelcoming line. His lips pressed against each other would have looked pinched and unattractive on another mouth, but Glorfindel’s mouth wore even a look of displeasure with beauty. He really was an uncommonly handsome boy, growing into a stunning young man.

“May I come in?”

Glorfindel eyed him another moment, before shrugging in that sullen way of his that Fingolfin was long passed brushing off as youthful rebelliousness. Glorfindel stepped away from the door, leaving it open a crack as the only welcome he would give Fingolfin. 

Fingolfin entered, and eased the door shut behind him as he watched Glorfindel retreat to his bed, sitting down and crossing his arms across his chest.

Fingolfin looked away from the defensive posture, and turned an eye around the room. The window offered a view down into a darkened garden, but the stars pulled the eye first and foremost. 

He had found himself wandering out onto the balcony of his rooms most nights, taking his thoughts with him. He’d stand at the railing, a cloak pulled on against the chill of this air devoid of Light, and gaze at the stars. He’d never wandered the wilds of Valinor as Fëanor had, never having the time to leave the city he helped his father rule long enough to travel the months needed to pass from the overwhelming light of the Trees. He’d never seen the stars clearly until the Darkness swallowed the Tree’s Light. 

When he’d first found himself the ruling prince of Tirion, he’d done something rebellious and not entirely honorable. He picked the lock on the wing of the palace holding all that was left of Míriel Serindë, and entered the wing still dedicated to her memory. He’d never been allowed in before. As a child he asked questioned about the blue door painted with a thousand stars. It had looked like a night’s sky in the Outerlands, or so his mother told him. It smelt like adventure and mysteries to him. He knew better than to pester his father or Fëanor about it, but he asked strings of questions to his mother. She tried to hush the questions up, but the more she denied him answers, the more he itched to know what lay behind that door.

The itch had faded with the years, but the first night after his father had left him alone with the crown to follow the fire of the world into banishment, Fingolfin’s skin had itched with the need to defy. He’d needed that defiance like he needed breath. 

The wing dedicated to Míriel Serindë was both more and less than he’d always imaged. If he’d discovered its wonders as a child, he would have been horribly disappointed, for the treasure lay in the works of some stranger’s hand, shut away as they never should have been. All the painting left hanging in the wing captured memories of Endor, like a shrine dedicated to Cuiviénen.

In the silver light, almost, but not quite the light of starlight, he smelt wild lands and the primal beat of a world untainted by suffocating laws. His heart stirred with yearning for a lost heritage, for lands and freedoms that should have pumped through his blood from his moment of infancy when he, and all the Noldor, opened their eyes to a sky whirling with star patterns.

He pulled his gaze away from the window. Now was not the time to lose himself in the paths of memories. He had thrown himself into his duties since Fëanor’s sons brought the news of his father’s murder. He couldn’t afford to slow down and _think_. There was no time for mourning. Only after his people’s future was secure could he mourn. 

He did not know where Fëanor was, or even if he still lived. (Maedhros’ exhausted eyes as he collapsed into a chair, cloak stained from the wilds, yet another search party bringing back no news of Fëanor, his voice cracking as he confessed he feared his father would take his own life in the blackness of grief.) 

No. Fingolfin would not think of that. Fëanor was alive. The world could not go on without fire blazing life into the world. To do so would be like a dog struggling through the rest of its life after its leg had been amputated. It would limp on a few more years, but in the end its fate had been written the moment it had been crippled; it had only been pretending at life every day since.

He picked his way across the floor to the boy radiating suspicion. The room boasted no other seat. No personal items littered the bedside table, and though the rug before the fireplace hinted at a past chair occupying a place there, the chair had disappeared from the room along with anything but the barest of furniture. 

Turgon would not have stripped the room, no one but Glorfindel could have. Fingolfin was left grasping at wild guesses as he grappled with what was going on in that golden-head.

“May I sit beside you?”

Glorfindel’s gaze narrowed upon him from beneath a swath of hair falling across his brow. Fingolfin’s fingers twitched, but he did not reach out to tuck the hair behind the child’s ear. 

The boy was not Fingon with hair escaping his braids as he bounced about the room, Fingolfin laughing over his son’s latest escapades, heart swelling with adoration. The boy was not Aredhel running home with twigs and leaves knotted in her hair, tracking mud through the halls, and dashing ever just out of Fingolfin’s arms, fleeting and free as a white stag. The boy was not Turgon come running to Fingolfin’s arms, crying frustrated tears when he could not braid his plaits _just right_ , Fingolfin hoisting his quiet son with ink-stained fingers at seven years old into his lap as he combed out his son’s hair and taught Turgon perfection was not necessary; he was loved knotted braids and all.

Glorfindel watched him with wary eyes, but did not deny or accept the request. Fingolfin took the seat beside him on the bed slowly, watching Glorfindel back, but the child showed nothing in either face or body. 

Another child with a mask tight as a fist and golden hair flashed through his mind. He swallowed. The parallels between Finarfin and Glorfindel spun out in his mind, too many, and all rooted in a childhood where love fell in scraps and criticisms piled thick as burs on the brows of two children with sensitive mouths and eyes open and tender with compassion.

But Finarfin had healed and grown into a man of healthy soul and confident carriage. Glorfindel could too. The wounds could not reach more deeply than Finarfin’s own, surely. For though Irimë had grown into Indis’ daughter in truth, and Glorfindel’s father was as detached from Glorfindel’s raising as Finwë had been in Finarfin’s childhood, those most vulnerable years of Glorfindel’s growth had passed with a mother who loved him as she always should have. Whatever wounds Irimë’s had inflicted upon her son had been committed in his youth.

“Glorfindel…” Now he was here, sat beside the child, his tongue failed him. He didn’t know how to begin. He strove on regardless. “I know we have not spoken much since the day I took you from your mother, but I hold by what I said to you that day: I am here for you, if you need me.”

The line of Glorfindel’s jaw tightened, and he turned his eyes away, fixing them straight ahead.

“What your mother was doing to you was wrong.”

“It wasn’t—” Glorfindel shook his head, like throwing off an unwanted thought. His voice came firmer, not confident, but the voice of someone grasping for conviction. “It wasn’t that bad. She would talk to me sometimes, and she made sure I knew the consequences of letting others know of my…desires. But she never…it wasn’t that bad.” His voice couldn’t hold its attempt at conviction, and he ended in a whisper, not meeting Fingolfin’s eyes.

Fingolfin sat for a moment in silence, regarding this boy, his nephew, who he had allowed his own sister to mistreat for years. He was beginning to understand that whatever Irimë had done to her son, it was far worse than he had imagined. So bad Glorfindel could not even admit to it, hiding in shrugging shoulders and denials, as if he could hide from what had already been done to him while Fingolfin blinded himself with the duties of a ruling prince, allowing duties to cloud his eyes and his sister’s lies to deceive him.

Fingolfin’s voice dropped soft as cotton between them, “I took you from your mother because you deserve to be loved exactly as you are.” He heard Glorfindel’s sharp indrawn of breath. He leaned closer, keeping his voice pitched low. “I have told you before, but I will say it as many times as you need to hear: there is nothing wrong with you. Desiring males is not a crime or a sin. It is as natural as breathing for people like you…” He paused, but searching the boy’s face, unnaturally still, he made the decision to continue. With careful movements, his hands crept onto Glorfindel’s shoulder. It stiffened under his touch, but this time Fingolfin did not pull away. “Some men are created to desire other men, as you were. And as I was.”

Glorfindel’s head whipped around. “You? _You_?”

“Yes, me.” Fingolfin found a smile for the boy, passing it to him with all the sincerity and love he could wrap into it. “I am just like you.”

“But—” Glorfindel’s mouth could untangle no other words. His huge blue eyes searched Fingolfin’s face. Then, as suddenly as the amazement birthed in those eyes, the walls crashed down again. He slapped Fingolfin’s hand off his shoulder, drawing away, folding into himself. “I don’t believe you. You are a liar.”

“No, Glorfindel, no. I am not lying.”

Glorfindel curled his shoulders, arms still wrapped over his chest. He shrank into himself like a turtle into its shell. “You are lying. You are always lying.”

“What?” Fingolfin did not pursue Glorfindel. He drew his hand back into his lap, sitting very still so as to not frighten him. “When have I lied to you?”

Glorfindel’s eyes glared out at him from a face hard and brittle as a thin sheet of ice. Apply a touch too much pressure and the child would shatter. Glorfindel side-stepped the question, “Why haven’t you ever told me you were like me before, then?”

“I...you were so young when we met. It would not have been appropriate.”

Glorfindel sneered. “Oh, I see. You were afraid I would blather your precious secret all over Tirion. But that was years ago. I am fifteen, not a child, but you never said anything.”

The situation was unraveling. Fingolfin could only offer the truth, “You are correct. I did not tell you because I did not trust you to keep the secret of my preferences. You understand the seriousness of our desires. I have no doubt Irimë informed you of that.” 

He would not apologize for not trusting a child of ten with his sexuality, or later, a moody young man who gave every appearance of strongly disliking him with something that could destroy him. He would not have spoken now if he did not deem it the only way to get Glorfindel to trust him.

Glorfindel’s mouth set, glare heating, “What is to stop me from telling everyone who will listen now?”

Fingolfin laced his fingers in his lap, turning a cool gaze on Glorfindel. Pinned with the eyes of the ruling prince of the Noldor, Glorfindel dropped his, and shifted on the bed when Fingolfin still did not release him from his gaze. “I understand you are upset. I even respect your right to dislike me. But I will not be _threatened_.” 

He paused, and when the boy’s hands began worrying the hems of his sleeves, he had mercy on him and released him from his gaze. He continued, voice softened, “You have been hurt, deeply, and I am far from blameless in this, for I did not act to remove you from your mother’s care swiftly enough. It was not my intention to hurt you yet again with this revelation. I wished only to let you know you are not alone.”

Glorfindel’s lashes hid his eyes, and his shoulders curled up around his ears.

Fingolfin reached out, touching light as the brush of a moth’s wings upon Glorfindel’s hair. Glorfindel went absolutely still under the touch, but he did not pull away. “I wish I had taken you away, all those years ago, when I first met you. I wish I had scooped up that little boy who tried on his mother’s dresses and peals and laughed free and merry as a summer breeze.”

Glorfindel’s eyes flickered up, and Fingolfin sucked in a breath. All masks had been shattered.

He’d known Irimë had lied to Glorfindel about his nature, and from the boy’s moody behavior and shyness to touch, he’d believed the boy’s life had been lacking in affection and the affirmation of love, as Finarfin’s had been. But the full measure of damage was written in eyes looking out at the world at last free of the shields behind the blue. It was the yearning, a desperate, hungry yearning, which undid Fingolfin and took him like a slap across the face.

He had done this. With his inaction he had wrought these eyes, this starvation. Irimë had wielded the sword, but he had stood by and let her.

“My mother…I wanted…but I think…I think my mother is a liar. I think…she was lying about everything, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, child. I am so sorry.” Fingolfin dropped a kiss into the place the boy’s waves of golden hair met his brow, wanting to pour love out on the child until it was enough to wash away all the pain.

“Was she lying—She lied when she told me she did those things because she loved me. She never loved…” Glorfindel’s voice faded out like a bird’s song when an arrow took it in the breast. 

“I am sorry, child.” He would not tell Glorfindel his mother loved him. Irimë believed she did, but what she had done to Glorfindel was not love, and he would not have Glorfindel believing it was lest he start believing that kind of love was the only kind he deserved. 

Glorfindel’s body trembled, chin dropping to tuck against his chest, hair falling in a curtain before his face. “I want to be alone now.”

“No. I cannot do that.” His arm slipped about the boy’s waist and pulled him across the bed to rest against his side.

Glorfindel went rigid in his arms. When Fingolfin tried to draw Glorfindel’s head against his chest to cradle the boy against him, Glorfindel fought it. Glorfindel made to shove away, but Fingolfin would not release him.

“Shh, Glorfindel, just let me hold you. It is all right, it is all right.”

“No! Leave me alone! I don’t want you!” Glorfindel twisted in his arms.

“I know.” Fingolfin’s eyes squeezed shut, and he pressed a kiss into Glorfindel’s brow, touching the golden waves of hair softly. Glorfindel wanted another holding him and kissing him. He wanted his mother. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe he wanted no one. Or maybe he wanted _someone_ , anyone. 

Glorfindel twisted this way and that, hands pushing against Fingolfin’s chest, and then balling into fists and battering. Glorfindel was not such a child the strikes did not hurt, but Fingolfin held on as the tears started. The sobs rocked Glorfindel as he fought until his body shook with the violence of them.

Glorfindel kept fighting, even through the tears, long after another child would have surrendered. His fist took Fingolfin across the cheek, snapping his head back with the blow, and Fingolfin’s arms loosening long enough Glorfindel could have wiggled free. But Glorfindel did not. He stilled, staring up at Fingolfin as Fingolfin brought his face back around, resisting the temptation to touch his stinging cheek. The blue expanse of Glorfindel’s eyes were wide and full of shadows.

Fingolfin’s arms slipped from restraining to cradling. His fingers came up to tuck the storm of gold behind Glorfindel’s ear, touch gentle as a rabbit’s nuzzle. His hand slid through the silken hair to support the back of Glorfindel’s head, and guide it down to his shoulder. The wide eyes overflowing with pain fluttered closed.

“I have you.” Fingolfin kissed Glorfindel’s brow. “I will not let you go, dearheart.”

Glorfindel made a little whimpering noise, nose rising up to seek out Fingolfin’s neck. Fingolfin pulled him into his lap, and Glorfindel came as unresisting as a doll. Glorfindel’s shoulders were too broad, legs too long, to fit as a child would, tucked up under Fingolfin’s chin, but Fingolfin held his nephew regardless. 

“You are not alone, dearheart. I have you now. I have you.” He rocked him, dropping light brushes of kisses into Glorfindel’s hair and face. “I love you, exactly as you are, I love you. And I am not leaving you alone.”

The boy’s arms rose to loop about Fingolfin’s neck, burying his face deeper into its crook. Fingolfin rubbed Glorfindel’s back, hand running over the curvature of his spine. Glorfindel lifted a face wearing the tracks of tears, but did not remove his arms from their embrace of Fingolfin’s neck, or pull away further than the space of a breath.

Those blue eyes hovered close and wet, vulnerable. Fingolfin’s arms tightened about the boy. “You are loved.” He pressed the comfort of this truth into his voice. Glorfindel’s eyes flickered across Fingolfin’s own. “I do not lie. I swear it. I love you.”

Glorfindel’s mouth took his with the swiftness of a swooping hawk. Fingolfin froze. Glorfindel’s mouth fit with the clumsiness and innocence of the untried over his, but in the arms shaking around Fingolfin’s neck there was desperation and fear of rejection, and in the tongue flicking out to lap at Fingolfin’s lower lip there was want and shyness.

Fingolfin’s hands dropped to Glorfindel’s hips, and with infinite care he eased Glorfindel back. With the feel of Fingolfin pulling away, Glorfindel threw himself back, breaking from Fingolfin’s arms entirely, almost taking a tumble upon the floor, but gaining his feet. They stared at each other, Glorfindel’s hand over his mouth, Fingolfin scrambling for the right words to make Glorfindel understand he was not rejected but not accepted either.

“Glorfindel, you…you are only fifteen. It would not be appropriate for me to return your affection. I love you, I do, but as my nephew, as I would love a son. I cannot give you what you desire.”

Glorfindel dropped his hand, the mouth revealed trembled. His words shook, but he pushed them out, “I know. I...there is something wrong with me. I know you could not…I don’t even know why I…I…”

“No, no,” Fingolfin stood, reaching out, but Glorfindel shied from his touch, refusing the clasp of his arms. “There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with wanting to kiss someone. But I am an adult, and in a position of authority over you. It would not be right.”

Glorfindel folded his arms over his stomach. “I would like you to leave now.”

“Glorfindel,” he took a step closer, but Glorfindel took one back, keeping distance between them. “I cannot leave things like this. I need to fix this.”

Glorfindel’s eyes met his, both too young and aged beyond his years. “You cannot fix this. It was already broken.” Glorfindel turned his face away, but not before Fingolfin caught a glimpse of his crumpling mouth. Through a shuddering breath, Glorfindel said, “I want to be alone.”

It might be better to respect Glorfindel wishes for privacy, but Fingolfin could not leave him now. Every bone in his body told him to leave now would be to lose Glorfindel forever, all hope of healing burning to ash. He did not try to press his touch upon the boy. He retreated to the bed, allowing Glorfindel space, if not privacy.

His hands slid over the bed’s cover, fingering the fabric, eyes turned away from the sight of Glorfindel’s struggle to compose himself, but the sound of those shaky breaths were inescapable.

“I am sorry.” Fingolfin’s voice came soft, but carrying. “You are not a child to have pulled you into my lap and hold you as I did. I confused you, and the fault of what happened lies wholly with me.”

Glorfindel shook his head, “You are only saying that because—”

“I say it because it is the truth. You were in a vulnerable place, and I did not react to it in a manner appropriate for your age or our level of intimacy. You are not my son. You know me but a little. Holding you in an embrace is one thing, taking you into my lap and kissing you, innocent as I meant those kisses to be, is another. I am the only one to blame for what happened.”

Glorfindel’s arms unwound from their clasp over his belly, and he raised his head enough for blue eyes to meet Fingolfin’s through the shadow of hanging gold. “You do not know me, as you say. But I know enough of my own…desires, to know the fault lies with myself.” He looked away. “I…I often find myself….you were kind to me and I saw something that was not there,” he ended in a whisper.

Fingolfin would not turn this into a back and forth of casting blame, but he could not leave it like this either. “But I should have been more aware of how my actions appeared. Come, let us put it aside. As I told you, there is nothing wrong with desiring to kiss someone, Glorfindel. Please, do not be shamed over a kiss.”

Glorfindel’s eyes darted back to him, and after a moment of hesitation, he nodded.

Fingolfin smiled, gesturing to the bed beside him. “Come, sit with me again.”

Glorfindel walked with slow steps to the bed, and when he settled himself down it was far enough away from Fingolfin their bodies could not brush by design or accident.

Fingolfin watched the candlelight dance shadows and kisses of gold over Glorfindel’s skin, and weave its enchantment like warm honey into his hair. Glorfindel kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, offering Fingolfin only a grim-mouthed profile with shoulders set in a tense line.

“I would see you happy and healed, but I fear I will not be enough for you to heal. I swear to you, Glorfindel, I will not abandon you. I will not allow my duties to take me from you either.” Never again. He would never let his duties to his people come before his family again. This lesson came at too high a price, but it would be one he never unlearned. He loved his people, and lived to serve them, but only to a point. Nothing would ever again eclipse his family, this he swore.

Glorfindel’s head bowed, but his body lost some of its coil, and he leaned, ever so slightly, towards Fingolfin. 

“I know what I ask of you might be frightening. But I believe the only way to heal will be to allow others in, give them the chance to prove to you that they will still love you even knowing the way your desires turn. I know it will not be easy to speak to someone of this, but—”

“I can’t.” Glorfindel’s hands fisted in the bedcover, and the tension snapped back into his muscles as if he braced for a blow. “I can’t tell anyone. I just…no. I can’t do it.”

“Glorfindel,” Fingolfin made the mistake of leaning forward, hand reaching for Glorfindel’s clenched one. 

Glorfindel jerked away, eyes flying wild to Fingolfin’s face. “No!” His breath came a hair’s breadth from panic. “I can’t!”

“All right, all right,” Fingolfin held up his hands. “Forgive me. We will not speak of it again until you are ready.”

Glorfindel’s lashes fluttered shut and he gulped in air until the tendons in the back of his hand no longer stood out like a tulip’s veins.

Fingolfin kept his voice soft and soothing, “I believed placing you into the care of Turgon and Elenwë was the right course of action. Elenwë is a gentle spirit, full of love. She is ready to love you, if you could only allow her to. Was I mistaken though? Do you need something, someone, else?”

Glorfindel swallowed, licking his lips. “No, you were not mistaken. I want…but she…” He loosed his stranglehold on the blanket, and clasped his hands in his lap. “She does not know about my…desires. And I cannot allow myself to accept…I do not know, you see, I do not know what she would say if she knew, what her face would…when she looked at me _knowing_ …”

“I wish I could tell you that her regard for you would not change, but I do not know her views on the loving of the same-sex.” Elenwë was a Vanya, and had been raised as such. As kind and loving as she was, Fingolfin had seen others just as seemingly good turn their faces away from those who needed their love. “I cannot offer you the abundance of nurture and time that you deserve, but if you wish it, I will care for you and be a father to you.”

Glorfindel looked up, mouth parted to softness from the grim line it had worn. His eyes swept over Fingolfin’s face, full of a longing he could not hide, too powerfully did it shake him. But he said, “I believe you. I do. And I could have never hoped for…but no. Thank you for the offer but…” His eyes slid away, brow creasing. “I know it is foolish, and I know Elenwë may despise me if she knew, but I _want_. You were right, from the first, I want her. Her love, the love she gives to Idril. I am sorry—”

“No, do not apologize.” Fingolfin’s hand crossed the distance to Glorfindel’s with caution, but Glorfindel did not pull away this time, and Fingolfin’s hand landed lightly over the back of his. “I will still be here for you, as I promised. She loves you, Glorfindel, she does.”

Glorfindel’s eyes carried sorrow and a world of doubt. “But she would not love me if she knew. She would be disgusted.”

Fingolfin squeezed the hand under his. “You do not know that.”

Glorfindel looked away. “Yes I do.”

Fingolfin could not say Glorfindel was wrong, though his heart ached with the despair and resignation in the boy’s voice. Glorfindel bore no hope of acceptance. “There are others who will love you, all of you. I do. And Fingon would as well if you told him.” 

Fingolfin could say this with confidence. He had shared his own desires for men with Fingon. He kept the truth locked in his heart over-long, and it had taken Fingon coming back from a visit to Foremost with golden ribbons braided through his hair as he laughingly told Fingolfin Maedhros enjoyed the sight of him like this, for Fingolfin to finally breach his silence. Too long he had hidden the deepest parts of himself from his son, from everyone. 

His mouth could not form the words to pass on the secret of his hidden desire: Fëanor. But at the least Fingon now knew in preparation for the day he looked upon Maedhros and saw a man who loved him looking back. Fingolfin did not know how his son’s heart would turn, or if the possibility to love Maedhros was within him, but Fingolfin had to know Fingon would not, in a moment of shock, speak words he later regretted.

Secrets sunk deep into their society. Men who desired men and women who desired women walked through the Great Square every day and passed in the corridors, but their natures were buried and guarded like a treasure. Yet it was no treasure they guarded against watching eyes, but their place within their world, their families. It was the fear of being cast out from loved one’s hearts or being dragged before a court and Shamed that kept their lips sealed tight. No one could know; this was what they told themselves every morning they woke on another day they would play pretend. No one could ever know.

Glorfindel recoiled from the idea of sharing his deepest secret with Fingon. “I can’t tell _him_!”

“Why? Because you find him handsome?” Fingolfin kept any note of teasing out of his voice.

“I…” A blush stormed across Glorfindel’s cheeks. “You know?”

“Yes.” Fingolfin ran his thumb over the junction of Glorfindel’s thumb and pointer finger. “Do not fear, I will say nothing. But Fingon, while he cannot return your affections just as I could not, for you are yet too young, will not turn from you if he knew your desires ran towards men.”

Glorfindel shifted, eyes flitting around. “No, I can’t tell him. I just can’t.”

Fingolfin sighed. He could not force Glorfindel, nor would he violate Glorfindel’s trust by sharing Glorfindel’s nature with Fingon without Glorfindel’s permission. But he feared for Glorfindel’s healing if he had only one person to confide in. Glorfindel would be more likely to share the details of what Irimë had done to him to Fingon than Fingolfin, for Fingon already shared a close relationship with him.

“He knows of my own nature, Glorfindel. I promise you, he will not reject you.” Fingolfin turned Glorfindel’s hand over, slipping his back over it, palm to palm. “Promise me you will think on it at least.”

Glorfindel stared down at their clasped hands. “I promise. I…thank you.”

Fingolfin dropped a chaste kiss into Glorfindel’s hair. “I want to hear you laugh again, dearheart.”


	15. Chapter 14

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 14

Time passed strangely. It skipped like a pebble over a lake’s surface. Other times it rushed by until Celebrimbor was dizzy and disoriented in its wake, trailing behind like a lost child. Yet other times it passed with the sluggish drip drip plop of molasses pooling out of a tilted jar. 

The activates that once would have filled his day –the clanging of hammer upon anvil, the laughter of Uncle Amras, a carefree stroll through the woods with Uncle Maglor’s voice drifting from the house smooth as starlight—all these things had ground to a halt. All that was left was the waiting, the ticking of unmeasureable time. He could not even be sure time was a linear thing any longer. Perhaps Valinor had been sucked into a void where time as they knew it had ceased to exist. 

Time rearranged itself into meaning when they found the one who would take the Noldor in hand and lead them out of this Darkness. The one who would place the hammer and scroll and harp back in their hands and give them purpose, or so it seemed in their directionless existence. They had found Fëanor, Uncle Maedhros and him.

It was not the first search party Celebrimbor participated in, but it was the only successful one. Fëanor had fled into the wilds after learning of his father’s death, so great was his grief, and they had been searching for a sign of him since. 

They heard a sound like a grunting animal, maybe a bear causing mischief in the underbrush or an over-eager buck sniffing about his marked doe. Celebrimbor did not expect to find his grandfather hacking at a fallen tree with one of the long swords he’d labored many months perfecting.

Fëanor’s hair, matted with twigs, mud, and leaves, flew loose about him like a dark nightmare. His lips pulled back in a snarl that looked more beast than man, and his eyes…There was madness within his eyes as he attacked the log as if it was Melkor himself. Maedhros put a hand on Celebrimbor’s shoulder and told him to wait here. 

With cautious steps, like approaching a wild animal, Maedhros closed the distance between himself and his grief-maddened father. In the end Maedhros had to wrestle the blade from Fëanor’s hands. Fëanor spewed vicious, deranged words at his firstborn and threw punches, trying to bite and tear at the one who had come between him and his violent mourning. 

Maedhros fended off the blows easily; Fëanor was not in his right mind, and Maedhros had always been light on his feet. Celebrimbor jumped in his saddle when he heard the sharp sound of Maedhros’ hand making contact with Fëanor’s face. It echoed off the trees in the sudden silence it earned.

Fëanor’s head jerked back with the blow, clawing hands dropping to his sides before slowing, shocked fingers came up to touch his lip, coming away stained with blood.

“Fëanor Curufinwë, son of Finwë Ñoldóran and Míriel Þerindë, greatest of the Children, the pupil of Ilúvatar’s eye. Remember yourself!” 

Maglor was ever remembered in later years as the son of Fëanor most gifted in song. Yet, while Maglor had the fairest and most magically powerful voice, Maedhros inherited their father’s. Unusually deep for one of the Eldar, Maedhros and Fëanor’s voices were the kind that knit themselves into skin and sent shivers down spines. Deep, like seasoned wine on the tongue or aged velvet against a cheek. They had a voice that could make you _do_ things. When Maedhros or Fëanor spoke, you stood up and paid attention.

So it was now. Maedhros’ voice –the challenge woven into it—snapped Fëanor out of his grief-madness. But, though Fëanor no longer spat curses and his fingers unbent from their clawed shapes and he let Maedhros assist him cleaning up his appearance before they road back to Tirion, as Fëanor mounted the horse behind Celebrimbor, taking the reins from his grandson’s hands, Celebrimbor couldn’t fool himself into thinking he didn’t see madness lingering in the corners of Fëanor’s eyes. 

As his grandfather turned their horse back towards Tirion, wetness dropped onto Celebrimbor’s palm. He lifted his hand to his cheek, and found he had been crying. He shivered, a hollow pit yawning open in his belly. What if Fëanor never recovered? What if his grief slew him like Míriel’s sickness killed her? Celebrimbor couldn’t…he couldn’t… He covered his face with his hands, sucking in ragged gulps of air, trying to swallow all this terror and anguish down. Grandfather wouldn’t die. Grandfather wouldn’t die. Grandfather—

Fëanor wrapped his arms round Celebrimbor’s waist, pulling his back flush against his chest. He dropped his nose into Celebrimbor’s hair, and whispered, voice raw and naked, “Forgive me. Forgive me. I am here now, my dear. I promise I will not leave you alone again.”

*

They made the mistake of asking Fëanor if there was any special possession of Finwë’s he’d like to keep after Fëanor returned from the wilds, impeccably dressed and not a hint of his grief visible to those who did not know where to look. Of course Fëanor, as Finwë’s eldest, was king now and could claim the very city his father had built as his, but personal items belonged first to Indis as Finwë’s widow, and Fëanor was hardly Finwë’s only child who desired some keepsake to remember their father by.

Fëanor answered, a sneer on his lips: “I would keep his heart, the gentleness of his hands, the exact shade of his eyes. These things would I keep. But as for trinkets, nay, I want none. You may pick over his treasures like vultures, but I do not need jewels to remember my own father by.”

*

The high princes of the Noldor called their people to assembly. Their people answered. The Noldor left their work and gathered in the Great Square. Even in a world without light they were not idle. _Because_ the world was without light they were not idle. They feared the Darkness, hated the one who murdered their king, and distrusted the Valar seated in silence on the mountain, no guidance, not even a herald to over comfort sent.

The Noldor came with grim faces, arms holding young ones close, but eyes fixed on the House of Finwë, the House of the Star. They were ready to be delivered from doubt and fear, and set upon a course of action. They were the Noldor, and they did not hide like rabbits in their holes when evil walked abroad.

The Lamps ringed the Great Square, and more than one hand held aloft a flaming torch, dousing the air with the scent of fire and smoke. The stars draped them like a mantel stitched with diamonds. No fear of the Darkness touched Glorfindel’s heart here, surrounded by a mighty people, the House of Finwë standing like the princes and princesses they were before the eyes of their people.

Elenwë’s hand closed around his, her other pulling Idril close. They stood with the rest of Finwë’s House on the palace steps, but hung around the fringes. His mother had pushed into the heart to stand proud and tall beside Fingolfin, yet closer still to Maglor. But she could not reach Maglor’s side, for he stood with his brothers, and Fingon, Angrod, and Aegnor had taken up the positions closest to the Fëanorions.

His gaze fell from his mother as a man strode like one of the Valar themselves –so glorious and fell was his face—to the highest point of the palace steps. Glorfindel’s mouth went dry and his brain stuttered at the sight of _Fëanor_. If one of Varda’s stars had fallen from the sky in that hour, it would not have outshone Fëanor. 

Glorfindel was besotted, swept away in a tide of hero worship. He tried to look away, he’d learned long ago not to let his eyes linger upon men, but he could not will his body to obey his commands. Fëanor was the star set before his eyes making him feel hot and dizzy just at the memory of those hands combing through his hair and brushing against his neck. He was not the only one who looked upon Fëanor with awe and not a small measure of adulation. Greatest of the Eldar he appeared in that hour when he rose like a beacon, a savior, in their moment of need.

Upon Fëanor’s head rode the crown that so recently adorned his half-brother. The golden light of its jewel was reminiscent of the raped Silmarils as it blazed glorious and vengeful upon his brow. It seemed even the jewel acknowledged Fëanor’s greatness, and purred at the touch of its creator’s hot skin. Fëanor’s speech struck into their bones with the promise of vengeance like the first sparks of an insatiable flame, and sat the world upon their tongues. It tasted sweet, like the choicest fruits of autumn. 

As the assembled Elves began to disperse, the fire of Fëanor’s words hot in their blood, Glorfindel found a chance to slip away from Elenwë. His mother had removed herself from the cocoon of her nephew and nieces to follow Maglor’s retreating path where Fëanor led his sons back into the palace, their eyes fey and flashing jewel-bright. Glorfindel trailed her, hanging back, just shy of an eye turned and catching him in its net. He had not spoken or seen her since he’d broken before Fingolfin and engaged his uncle in a kiss he could not think of without his cheeks burning in shame. 

He drowned the memory, holding it under the water’s surface as it thrashed, until his mind stretched sooth as a lake’s surface on a windless day. All the torment buried deep below. His mother had taught him this technique of calming the mind. He had been a slow learner, stumbling over it as he stumbled over everything, but he’d learned how to wear a mask of calm when he bled inside.

He followed as his mother hustled after Maglor because Glorfindel had things to say to her, things eating at his guts like worms. He’d been dreaming of late, different dreams than the ones of kissing boys and doing other perverted things with them (Fingolfin told him it was not unnatural, but it was so hard to _believe_ ). In the new dreams his mother appeared. Sometimes he would speak to her in them, speak until he screamed, until he’d disgorged all this pain inside him. Sometimes he didn’t just speak. Sometimes he hurt her. 

He’d wake, covered in sweat, breathing ragged in his lungs, and cover his eyes against the images. Even awake the desire to _hurt_ ate at him. He wanted her to know a measure of the hurt she inflicted on him. But the worst dreams were the ones in which he fell into her arms, clinging to her, sobbing and begging her to love him again. She never held him back.

When his mother reached Maglor, Glorfindel lingered just within hearing distance. His mother called out to Maglor, her hand closing about his arm to pull him up short. As words a wife would gift her husband passed her lips, and Glorfindel finally understood why he’d never been allowed to go home. 

His mother tilted her head up to clasp Maglor’s eyes. “I will never leave you, Maglor Fëanorion. Wherever our new lives take you, I will be by your side. Even unto the doors of Morgoth’s stronghold will I follow you!”

Maglor turned his face away, and when his mother tried to put her hand in his, his skin slipped like smoke from hers. He left her there, hands fisting at her sides, eyes flashing, to follow his father and brothers.

Glorfindel drifted closer, feet having minds of their own. Through the noise of the crowd, he heard his mother hiss, “He is in shock. He will remember how much he needs me in time.” 

No, he would not. Maglor would never admit any such thing, not now he’d seen in Irimë what Glorfindel had. Why would anyone want to cling to that? (If Glorfindel still dreamed of his mother’s mouth shaping the words ‘I love you’ as Elenwë’s did, and fitting her arms about him with softness, he pretended he did not.)

His mother spun on her heel, skirts swirling, and hair shimmering behind her. Many commented on his mother’s beauty, comparing her looks to her mother’s. But as her eye fell on him, mouth set in that proud, unforgiving scroll, Glorfindel saw only the beauty of a wasteland; lands swept down to their barren bones, carved naked of any softness by the wind.

Her face shifted from its spike of anger, not into softness, no, not for the son who’d disappointed her so consistently, not for the son she’d kept tucked away in the backrooms until the tears of a shameful child dried and his face learned how to conceal his deformity of character beneath a mask since he wasn’t strong enough to banish it. He was her shame, her deep regret, the child she only claimed to love because it was expected of her, not because she found anything worth loving. 

It was into a flash of triumph her face shifted, before she remembered to arrange it into one proper for a mother greeting the son snatched from her breast. “Glorfindel, my son,” she smiled, walking to him with slow steps, but no hesitancy in her right to approach him. “You have managed to slip free of your keepers, I see.” She spoke as if sharing some jest with him, as if all Fingolfin’s measures to keep her from Glorfindel were a matter of humor. 

She stopped before him, and his body braced itself, but she did not try to take him into an embrace. There were no eyes watching. She did not touch him with anything hinting at a mother’s love without witnesses. 

Her eyes ran over him, inspecting. From the tightening of her mouth he had not passed. His feet shuffled, hands smoothing down his tunic before running through his braids. Elenwë had smiled at him when he’d come to breakfast in a silver tunic with starlings, fairywrens, and quetzals embroidered with jewel-bright thread and glittering gems. “One of my brother’s old tunics. I am pleased his clothing suits you so well. It is good for it to see wear again.” Glorfindel looked down, fingering the ruffle at the hem of the undershirt in the secrecy under the table. He should not have worn it, but his fingers had lingered upon it, and his eyes shifted back and back again, wanting. But though he had given in to the weakness of his nature and slipped on this pretty thing, Elenwë blessed him with smiles.

His mother’s eyes locked on the hint of undershirt Glorfindel’s loosened collar revealed. His hands flew up to rebutton the high collar, though it was too late to erase that hint of lace from her eyes. “Are you wearing a woman’s nightdress under there?”

“No, Mother, just something of Lady Elenwë’s brother’s.”

Her mouth pinched. “Well, one cannot account of the taste of _that_ House. Do not make a habit of wearing such a person’s cast-offs. Her brother, if I recall, is a very _effeminate_ kind of man. A poet,” her mouth fit a sneer around the word. 

Glorfindel forced his eyes not to drop with the shame curling like milk curds in his belly. He plunged passed the shame she’d taught him to wear like a second skin, down into the festering pit of rage. He would not give her this power over him!

“Well, at least you are here.” She tossed her hair off her shoulders, moving on, as she ever had after she’d cut him down, as if it was nothing and he should learn to melt steel to the backs of his knees so he didn’t buckle under her blows. How many times had she told him he was too soft and she was only helping him grow stronger so he would survive in the world, wasn’t that the place of a parent?

Glorfindel knocked blocks into his shoulders and a rod down his spine, and met her eyes. She blinked, mouth parting to see his eyes sparking like fireflies. “I like it.”

“Excuse me? I will not be spoken to in that tone, young man.”

Glorfindel’s eyes narrowed. “I like this tunic, and I shall wear it if I wish.”

Her arms crossed, not backing up an inch from the snap in his voice. “That is quite enough of that. I see you have already picked up unpleasant habits from living with such people. Not that I expected better from a woman like Elenwë as your supposed guardian.”

Glorfindel’s hands balled. He wanted to—No. He was not the sort of low-life who struck out with his fists. “You don’t know anything about Lady Elenwë. She is kind and gentle, and she loves me—”

His mother laughed, a sharp bark of sound that turned the heads of Elves mingling just far enough away to observe the princess and her son high up in the shadow of the palace’s great doors, but not close enough to catch the thread of conversation.

“You think her doting is love?” Scorn dripped from her words like honey from a comb.

He lifted his chin, and even though Elenwë wouldn’t love him if she knew what he was he threw into the face of his mother’s laughter: “I know it is!”

His mother’s hand cut through the air, slicing it like a knife’s fall. “That is _nothing_! True love requires sacrifice. The kind of sacrifices I have made for you, for your safety and healing. You are looking with the eyes of a weakling who watches Elenwë coddle that girl of hers and wish it was you in her arms. But that is the kind of love that feels pleasant for a few years, but when you have outgrown sugary kisses you find yourself a spineless man without the strength or skills to survive in the world.”

“Glorfindel,” she drew closer until she eclipsed everything, her visage lofty and unmerciful, and eyes demanding he be something he was not. He shook, but it was not with the anger slipping like water from his fingers, leaving only the boy behind. “I have loved you with a true love, though I have been badly treated on all side because of it, condemned by my own brother! I have lost Fingolfin’s love for your sake! I have hurt myself as much as I have hurt you, but it was for _your_ benefit. And I will never turn from you, have I not proven that to you? Am I not here, loving you, despite the unnaturalness or your desires? Is this not what you want, my son? To be loved as fiercely as I love you? This is love.” She held out her palm as if offering him to sip from her heart. “This is true love, the only love that lasts. What Elenwë and Fingolfin give you is fleeting, here today, gone tomorrow. But my love is eternal.”

She reduced him to nothing but his imperfections and ungratefulness. He was the ugly, filthy boy begging for scraps of her love. And she the mother formed of ice crystals pulling out her measuring stick and her scissors. Everywhere he did not meet her standards, she clipped. Clip, clip, clip, but still, always, he did not pass inspection.

The hatred roared in like a firestorm, and he fell like grass before it, consumed, blackened. Yes, he opened his arms to the hate; the hate would make him strong enough. It made him feel powerful and free ridding high upon its storm.

He _hated_ her. He hated her tongue cutting him down, her judging eyes he could not please, her arms like rocks, her icicle heart, and curling lip. He hated this life she’d laid out like a garden path for him. He hated the smiles she’d picked out for his mouth, and lies for his tongue. He hated the masks she’d pulled over his face like a woman in Vairë’s service pulls a veil. He hated the person she’d molded him into with plotting, picking fingers. He hated himself. He was nothing but her creation.

“Glorfindel!” Turgon called him from the crowd. 

Glorfindel looked back, over his shoulder. Elenwë stood at Turgon’s side, lifting up on her tip-toes to search the mass of heads for his. Fingolfin and Fingon had followed after the Fëanorions as Irimë chased down Maglor, but Aredhel took up the call for him, her voice ringing out, not a shred of fear to be found within, for she was fearless. The uncle Glorfindel only knew from family dinners, Finarfin, had his arm about Guilin’s shoulders, and started asking Turgon when Glorfindel had last been seen, and could he have been waylaid in the crowd?

They may not love him if they knew what he was, but they cared enough to look for him when they thought him lost. Down there was his family; they called for him. They could not take the pain away, or make him clean and worthy, but their smiles cast his way, and arms looped over his shoulders, dulled the pain of who he was and who he could not be.

He left his mother, walking away from her and not turning back at her snapped command to return. Maybe she was the only one who loved him, and maybe she didn’t know the meaning of the word love, but he’d rather have his family’s care (as fleeting as that would prove if they ever discovered the truth) than her eternal love.


	16. Chapter 15

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 15

Year 1495 of the Years of the Trees, the Wastes of Araman

“About time!” Fingon stood with a grin as Glorfindel ducked into his cousin’s tent. “I thought you walked off one the cliffs with the way you kept me waiting!”

Glorfindel held up the Lamp in his fist. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t stumbling about in the dark.”

“Who says anything about worried?” Fingon snatched up his bow and quiver, sword belt already strapped on over a leather jerkin, wool tunic peeking out from beneath, with a heavy, fur-lined cloak thrown over.

Glorfindel shook his head at his cousin. Fingon had been worrying. Fingon’s restless fingers had picked at his braids until little coils of curls sneaked out to snuggle against his neck. Fingon looked beautiful enough to stop a stampede. 

Glorfindel readjusted his quiver and bow. “Well, I am here now. Ready?”

Fingon flashed a smile, teeth glinting pearl-bright in the Lamp’s light. “I already fetched our horses. They await only their fabulous riders. Let’s go see which of the scouting parties rode off a cliff.” Fingon slapped him on the shoulder, hand lingering to rest with a steady weight on the heavy wool of Glorfindel’s cloak.

“Why are you fixated on death by impact today?”

“Better to make light of an unpleasant situation than mope over what cannot be change, and unless Fëanor is a Vala in disguise, the cliffs aren’t suddenly going to transform into rolling grasslands.” Fingon’s hand slid from Glorfindel’s shoulder. He strode towards the tent’s entrance with steps confident as a prince and singing with the grace in his bones. 

His voice carried back to Glorfindel, all teasing shed to make room for the seriousness the situation deserved. “There are a lot of cliffs, and not enough light, Glorfindel. We might be able to see well enough not to stumble over each other in the darkness, but the horses can’t.” 

Glorfindel followed his cousin from the tent. The sky roofed them, stars dancing celestial patterns across the blackness. Fingon set off, setting a brisk pace as he wove through the camp, Glorfindel taking long strides to set himself at his cousin’s shoulder as they side-stepped darting children, clusters of woman bent over campfires, and men setting their hands to everything from bartering for dwindling supplies to sharpening their blades for the next patrol or hunting party.

Their people noted the two princes passing through, some stepping aside with inclined heads, others calling out greeting or blessings, others hurrying after them with requests. As Fingon and Glorfindel’s current duty could afford to be delayed, Fingon took the time to answer their people’s anxieties, curiosities, and grudges.

“How long does King Fingolfin plan for us to hold this location, Prince Fingon?”

“ _King_ Fëanor will wish to press on before the week is out. We have only delayed for the hunting parties.” Fingon did not say that the scouts returning from their furthest northward mission had reported barren lands more rock than earth, home to glaciers more ancient than some of the stars. Game would be hard to come by in such lands; even now they relied on the sea to feed the tens of thousands of mouths.

“Has King—Prince Fingolfin announced when the next ration of skins will be distributed? My daughter has only her cloak we brought out from Tirion, and the nights grow ever fiercer, my prince.”

“Clothing our people is one of my father’s highest priorities. The hunting parties will bring in more furs and skins. Do not fear, your daughter will be provided for.”

“Tell me, prince,” called a sharp-eyed man with arms crossed over his chest. “How goes King Fingolfin’s bartering with the stingy Fëanorions for more swords? Or does Fëanor horde the weapons for himself?”

Fingon’s mouth hardened as his eye settled on the man sowing discord. “It is not a matter of bartering between _Prince_ Fingolfin and your king, Fëanor. Metal-work is not a craft easily accomplished by a migrating people. The Fëanorion smiths have given what they can, and will continue to do so, just as we give them what supplies and skills those in our camp possess over theirs.”

The man was not done. “King Fingolfin—”

Fingon’s voice sliced through the air like a rapier’s slash. “You will address my father by his proper title of prince, and give to your lord and king Fëanor the respect his place as firstborn of Finwë deserves.” 

It had started in circles of disgruntled hearts nursing grudges and distrust against the Fëanorions, spread to ears clusters about campfires, and rolled out into the open from there. If Fingolfin had done anything to detach his name from that of king, there was no evidence of it. Fingon said (in private, far from the ears of their people who they could never speak the naked truths of their thoughts to), that his father was asking for a Fëanorion fist. ‘There is no way this is going to end well,’ Fingon’s eyes picked up shadows, worry pressing into his brow like thumbs.

Fingon’s heel snapped about, and he stalked from the cluster of Elves, Glorfindel jogging after him. Glorfindel said nothing as they cut their way through the camp, no longer stopping to answer the hailing of the Noldor.

As they drew further away from the High Houses’ tents, they passed from the light of the Lamps, mounted to high poles to offer the widest radius of light possible. There were simply not enough Lamps to light a camp numbering tens of thousands. There were other pockets of Lamp light ahead where hands toiled over the important work, but the stretches of tents in-between had only starlight and campfires to push back the darkness.

Fingon had left their horses with a cluster of others, bridles threaded through the bare branches of a sleeping bush. A Lamp washed them in a new wave of white light from where a group of Elves ringed a thicket of black walnut trees. The Elves lifted up their voices in a song of birth and nurture. The grass under the Elves’ feet had begun to uncurl from its slumber, perking up and flushing with the green of life. The change was stark, for the grass the horses’ nosed, pulling up and chewing with a duty to their stomachs rather than any delight in its sweetness, was brown and lay flattened to the ground like thatch.

The Elves clasped hands as they sung life into the earth to increase the power of their joint song, and threw back their heads to the sky like women caught in labor pains. Singing to life what already grew –a tree to ripen or a bush to bear its fruits—was not as exhausting as calling forth the sprout of crops. Trying to pull life from the womb of fields slumbering under the starlight was like trying to pull water from a desert. 

A gaggle of women had pulled benches into the high tide of the light, lugging their work with them. They’d brought their children, varying in age from babes nursing at the breast to rambunctious younglings weaving through the tents and knocking baskets over in a game of tag getting out of hand. Some of the women were young enough to giggle behind their hands to their friends, the bolder ones passing flirtatious smiles, as they watched Fingon and Glorfindel ready the horses.

Glorfindel’s gaze shifted away, back to his horse. A fine steed. Its roan flanks shone like an oater’s wet pelt with the flush of health. He slung his quiver up, buckling it to the saddle. His hands fumbled with the last clasp when a woman’s hand ran over his horse’s flank.

“He is a beauty, my prince.”

His eyes flickered to the young woman. She had left her friends to approach him. No, her friends had come upon them in number. Fingon was surrounded, and would not be able to help Glorfindel escape. 

He jumped when a hand came at him from the back, landing on his arm. He turned to find another of the young women at his side, boxing him in. This one gave him a smile that might have been called sweet, but Glorfindel only saw a plump, cherry-red mouth he was supposed to want to put his mouth on.

“What is his name, Prince Glorfindel?” The young woman gazed up at him from under her lashes. 

“I…” He shifted out from under the hand. “Look. I have duties to attend to with my cousin.”

“Oh? Are you going hunting with Prince Fingon?” The one who’d cornered him first asked. She’d drawn closer, almost pressing her body along his right side. “I hear you are very brave, and an excellent shot. Will you bring back a mighty buck for our cooking fires?” Her fingers ran with suggestion over the curve of his bow. “When you return, you could show me some of that prowess of yours.” Her friend giggled too close to his ear. 

His mask went down like a steel trap. He forced a smile for her, coaxing his bow out from under her fingers. “We will see. Now if you will excuse me, my cousin and I have pressing duties.”

She pouted, but stepped back, looping her arm with her friend’s. They strolled with a swing of their hips back to the woman watching from the benches with a mixture of disapproval and amusement. Glorfindel let out some of the tension coiled in his jaw, and sought Fingon with his eyes. The rest of the tension ebbed away to see Fingon had already sent the young women pursuing him away with what had no doubt been charming smiles hiding a neat dismissal. 

Fingon, for all the old rumors of his strings of indiscretions, would never pursue a woman when duty called. Glorfindel had watched Fingon flirt outrageously with everyone from barmaids to noblemen’s wives, but never once seen that flirtation spill into something more. 

Fingon swung himself into the saddle, and Glorfindel followed his lead. The breath came freer to his lungs atop his horse with distance between himself and women looking at him and _expecting_ things. He was supposed to look at their mouths and want, and follow the sway of their hips with eyes that lingered. But the only thing he wanted from those women was to get away. He felt like a fraud of a prince, a fraud of a man.

But he did not feel disgusted with himself. Or not as much as he once had.

He had confessed to Elenwë, in a moment of reckless abandon that could have ruined everything, that he dreamed of men. And she had not turned away from him.

He closed his eyes, drawing in a breath that felt almost…clean. It felt almost…almost as if feathers had been knit under his skin. He could see the glimmer of something beautiful upon the horizon. He was not there yet, though Fingolfin kept his promise and had not ceased to work towards Glorfindel’s acceptance of himself and his desires, what Glorfindel could admit with his mouth was not what his heart told him. His mother’s hooks had dug deep, and the doubts and lies could not be so easily scrubbed out.

Fingolfin said they were born to love men, but they hid behind masks. Fingolfin said their desires to lie beside, even under another man did not make them less of one, but Fingolfin did not long to paint his lips the rose of a woman’s. Fingolfin said those who called their desires wrong feared what they could not understand, but his mother had not been afraid, she had been disgusted. And she was not the only one. If it was just ignorance, why did so many of their people who knew choose hate over acceptance? If it was right by nature, why were they scorned?

But Elenwë, whose love he longed for like the snow-drenched meadow longs for spring, had not turned from him. Her face had not transformed into his mother’s when Irimë came upon him giving into the temptation to lose himself, just for a moment, in the fantasy of what it would be like to be touched by a man. Elenwë had told him to call her mother.

Maybe this _thing_ inside him was not as disgusting as his mother had taught him it was. Not that he wanted these desires. He would cut them out if he could, and look at those cherry-red lips and feel want. He wanted nothing so much as to be normal. But if he couldn’t have that, at least let him not be sickened by his own skin anymore. Hating oneself was exhausting. But he just wanted to crawl out of himself and be free of these desires, this body, this life.

Fingon slid Glorfindel a glance, eyes glittering in the Lamp light, the gold of his skin washed out in the white light. “All right there?”

Glorfindel looked away from the pinnacle of beauty and unattainability before his eyes. He shrugged. “Fine.”

“They are not wolves, just women. They will not eat you alive, little cousin.” Fingon left it alone after that. He would continue encouraging Glorfindel to keep his chin up, but he did not tease him over the shyness Fingon perceived his fumbling fingers and eyes shifting away from the blossoms of feminine beauty as being. Fingon could be blind, sweetly, exasperatingly so, but never cruel. 

Glorfindel was old enough now those had not been the first woman to make advances. Fingon had picked up on Glorfindel’s discomfort from the first. There had not been a teasing word since.

They turned their faces east, where starlight afforded only the impression of deeper darkness where the mountains rose like the hulking shapes of giants. It was into that darkness they rode. Fingon had assigned himself the duty of checking up on the eastern patrols, and picked Glorfindel as his second. 

Fingolfin and Finarfin’s followers had pitched their tents along the shore of a glacier-carved lake. It might have been a remnant from the days of the Valar’s Lamps, or a time before the Pelóri grudged the Tree Light to the wild lands beyond their teeth. The camp stretched passed the first fringes of the forests, far surpassing the bounds of the lake’s shore. 

Glorfindel followed Fingon as they wove through tents, hustling Elves, and trees alike. The earth rose steadily beneath their horses’ hooves, but the pine canopy blotted out a view of their destination: the rocky western foothills of the mountains where the land sliced in sheer drops, crumbled into gorges, and boulders ruled, abundant as shells upon the sea’s shore.

The land was not barren. The grass, though brown, flat, and sleepy upon the earth’s breast, was editable, and the trees and shrubs bore the nubs of leaves curled like pillbugs upon their branches. The world slumbered but was not dead. It would replenish that which was nibbled away as well, or so Fingon told Glorfindel the Fëanorion’s said, for they had wandered to the limit of the Tree Light and beyond.

A Lamp was bound on Fingon’s chest. He’d slotted the fist of light into the bronze setting the smiths fashioned back when the world first went dark. The Lamp drew the patrols to them like moths to the flame.

The patrolling scouts came with their reports, some having climbed high into the crooks of the mountain’s shoulders, up where ice structures as old as the Trees had formed and the stars seemed to bend down reaching hands longing for the light. No tumbles down a mountain side were passed from lips and into Fingon’s care, to be hefted onto his shoulder while he exchanged the trembling words of a comrade’s death with a warm clasp on the shoulder, as if, in that touch and a reassuring smile and soft word, he seeped all the horror out of them. 

Fingon sent another pair of scouts back to camp and the promise of a good meal and long night’s rest, his words of encouragement straightened the line of their slumped shoulders as they rode away. He turned a look back at Glorfindel, a silent observer to the brightness of his cousin’s heart that lit the darkness like a Vala’s flare. Fingon’s eyes met his. The Lamp’s like washed the summer blue of his eyes pale, and set sparks of light glittering like the shavings of a forge-fire in his irises. 

Everything Fingon was danced before Glorfindel, out-of-reach, but leaving Glorfindel dry-mouthed. Fingon would no more look back at Glorfindel’s admiring face than Fëanor would have. Glorfindel understood that, but the knowledge no more stopped the dreams of Fingon than of Fëanor. 

Fingon’s mouth spread into a slow smile. He shook his head at Glorfindel, the sharp, slender line of his nose casting shadows over his cheeks. “You are doing it again.”

“What?”

“Looking at me as if I put the stars in the sky.”

Glorfindel’s eyes torn away, mortified.

“I am nothing special, little cousin. But I will not deny that the fact you still, somehow, hero-worship me after all this time, doesn’t feels nice.” 

Glorfindel looked back and caught the wink Fingon sent him. His chest loosened. Fingon hadn’t connected Glorfindel’s admiration to something deeper. Why would he? Fingon’s was not a mind surrendered to the lure of abnormal desires. Glorfindel wished… but it didn’t matter what he wished. As Fingolfin had taken to reminding him, in an attempt at comfort, Glorfindel had been born unnatural.

Glorfindel swallowed. He could barely look into Fingon’s face he shone so beautifully. Fingon was a man of laughter and honest joy, of little vanity and no flattery. He was bravery, boldness, and beauty. “Of course I admire you. You have ever been my friend. I don’t…I don’t have many of those. I mean, real ones of those.”

The smile tucked away, and Fingon steered his horse closer to Glorfindel’s so he could reach over and clasp his shoulder. “You have me. And I am not going anywhere. I will be here for you. Always.”

Glorfindel tore his gaze away, throat working. There Fingon walked, bold and beauty, right up to him with his hand outstretched and a smile on his mouth, promising eternal friendship. When Glorfindel looked back, he found Fingon’s mouth wearing a soft curve that knew him inside and out. Or knew him as well as Glorfindel had allowed anyone to know him. Fingon knew him in a way different from Fingolfin. Fingolfin knew his secrets, his deep places, but Fingon knew the little things: what could pull a smile from Glorfindel’s mouth when it worn a line of sorrow, what would fold his arms over his belly to protect from the cold loneliness of the world, what could send him blushing, and what could rouse his outrage and have him hurling food at Fingon’s laughing head.

Fingolfin’s voice, urging him to confide in Fingon, looped circles about Glorfindel’s fleeing heart, trying to hold it still. Glorfindel had resisted Fingolfin’s council, again and again, though Fingolfin only wanted him to have someone he could heal with, an ear he could share the deepest pains of his life into, a friend as Fingolfin was not. But Glorfindel did not want to speak of Irimë. To anyone. Ever. He wanted the memories to stop haunting him. He wanted her to _go away_.

And more, Glorfindel could not tell Fingon what moved his desires lest Fingon’s eyes, now opened, begin to notice the way Glorfindel’s eyes lingered too long. If Fingon knew Glorfindel dreamed of men, he would not pass Glorfindel a smile when he said, ‘You look at me like I put the stars in the sky.’ He would begin to suspect that hero-worship was not the root of Glorfindel’s admiration. Glorfindel couldn’t bear it if Fingon’s smile morphed into disgust.

Fingon’s thumb brushed the shadow of Glorfindel’s collarbone. “You can tell me, Glorfindel. Whatever it is, you can trust me.”

The curving bones of Fingon’s brow and cheek seemed washed pure, a glowing setting into which the radiance of his eyes were set like gems. Glorfindel could not have torn his gaze away if his life depended on it. Fingon knew. Not the secret, but that a secret existed. He had known for a long time. Glorfindel could feel it when Fingon looked at him sometimes, all the smiles put aside, and seriousness that pulled with the intensity of the tide turned into the side of Glorfindel’s face where Fingon studied him. But he never pressed, never forced Glorfindel to confide in him. He did not press now, did not demand or wheedle, but Glorfindel felt the words climbing his throat, sluggish across the desert of his tongue, still trapped one last moment behind his teeth that drew out and out and out.

The words he’d opened his mouth to share on other days, other moments, but had never pressed through the barrier of fear and years of hiding, did now. Fingolfin promised, again and again, that Fingon would not turn from him. Fingolfin would not promise a lie. He was not a liar. Irimë had been the liar.

His voice tripped on the logs of lies and doubts but he forced it on, “Fingon, back there, with those women…I…you know I am …uncomfortable with their attention. You see…” The fear conquered him.

Fingon squeezed his shoulder, mouth curving in the kind of smile that tasted like tenacity in the back of Glorfindel’s throat, feeding him strength it its unwavering curves. “Don’t worry. It is all right to be shy.”

Glorfindel shook his head. “It is not shyness. Or, well, not all of it. I just…wasn’t interested in them.”

“That is all right. Some men only find their eyes drawn to a handful of woman in their life. There is nothing wrong with—“

“No. I am not interested in any women. I am like Uncle Fingolfin.” Glorfindel held his breath, eyes darting between Fingon’s. Fingon’s brow knit as the pieces clicked into place, and then cleared with the suddenness of a hawk’s shadow swooping over his face and pulling all the confusing away with its leaving.

“ _Oh_.” Fingon pulled back, straightening in the saddle, and Glorfindel couldn’t breathe. Then Fingon let out a huff of laughter. “You must think me the worst kind of idiot not to have noticed!”

The air filled Glorfindel lungs in a mighty gush. He found himself half-laughing as he spoke, the relief heady as a drug. He felt light head, dizzy, with the power of it. “No!” Never. “You have only ever been kind to me, even when I must have tried your patience.”

Fingon broke into laugher, the sound pinning a giddy grin to Glorfindel’s face, the kind of smile he couldn’t remember the taste of, it had been so long. “You, try my patience? How could you try anyone’s patience? Stop being ridiculous. If anyone is the one trying patience around here it is me.”

That was a lie big enough to offend the gods, but Glorfindel found he could do nothing but smile into.

When Fingon’s smile turned sly, eyes sparkling, Glorfindel knew what was coming, but that Fingon could tease him about _this_ , as if it were perfectly normal, wet the back of his eyes with tears that had nothing to do with sorrow. 

“So. Tell me, little cousin,” Fingon leaned in, elbow propped on his saddle horn. “Is there any lucky man who has caught your eye?”

Glorfindel’s cheeks heated, even knowing it had been coming. Fingon could be so predictable sometimes. Glorfindel put on an affronted look. “I am not talking to you about this! How typical. I have only just now confessed my most guarded secret, and already you are misusing it.”

Fingon held up his hands, smile flashing bright as Tree Light off snow. “No, more. I promise.” He paused, waiting for Glorfindel to pretend to graciously accept his retreat, before adding, “At least for a few hours.”

Glorfindel rolled his eyes, but though he would never confess just who had caught his eye to Fingon, not a shred of annoyance was summoned to his heart. Fingon could tease him over this for weeks, _years_ , and Glorfindel would grudge him nothing for Fingon was smiling at him, laughing with him, and everything was just the same between them. No, it was better, for the secret no longer raised a wall of isolation around Glorfindel’s heart.

Fingon set the teasing aside, and crossed the distance to rest his hand on Glorfindel’s forearm. “Thank you. For telling me.” Glorfindel’s eyes dropped to Fingon’s fingers curled around him. “It took a great deal of bravery. But you have always had courage.”

Glorfindel’s eyes flickered back up, and found only seriousness in Fingon’s. He meant every word. Glorfindel kept his own doubts to himself. It felt good to hear Fingon thought that of him, even though it was wrong.

Fingon broke the moment, pulling back. He stood up in the saddle, casting a look down from the look-out post they’d picked on a cliff’s side. “That last patrol made the sixth. That is all the eastern ones. Let’s head down to that valley,” he pointed to a scooped out strip of marshes below. “We might as well bring back some game while we’re out.”

Glorfindel agreed, and they began picking their way down the foothills and into the lowlands. As they forged a path through the thick forest of tress and slumbering underbrush crowding the lowlands, they spied a light bobbing their way. The Lamp’s carrier was still hidden, so Fingon called out: “Hail rider!”

A voice rang back, so beautiful flowers could have bloomed under its touched, and Glorfindel swore the buds of the trees nearest him unfurled a little in greeting. “Fingon, is that you?”

“Maglor!” Fingon laughed around the name. “Stop lurking in the underbrush and get over here.”

“Ah, that is my cousin’s fair tones, I am sure of it!” Now there was no mistaking the leaves’ uncurling as they sought out the light woven into every strand of the voice’s song. The world awoke with Maglor’s passage.

The light grew in power, and Maglor broke from the clinging trees. The land’s quickening was even more apparent in the green things blooming around him, with him the heart in its circle. It was as if the earth composed a symphony in welcome. Maglor was doing it on purpose. The closer he drew, the more aware Glorfindel became of the humming and playful verses Maglor spun out under his breath, a ceaseless waterfall of beauty.

Fingon kneed his horse the last few feet and greeted Maglor with a rueful smile and outstretched hand Maglor clasped. “You are loving this, aren’t you?”

Maglor arched a brow, but his mouth couldn’t quite suppress its smile. “What is that?”

“Being greeted like a Vala,” Fingon grinned. 

Maglor’s smile curved smug. “Jealous?”

“That I cannot leave a trail of flowers like deer droppings? Not in the least. I wager you have already composed a song in waiting for the flowers that will bloom under your feet when we step into Endor at long last.”

“That would be obscenely presumptuous of me.” Maglor leaned back in his seat, smile as confident as a cat’s.

“Hmm, yes. But you have done it anyway.” Fingon shook his head at Maglor, a deep fondness in his eyes. “And you wonder why half of Tirion couldn’t stand you.”

Maglor lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “They were letting their jealousies and petty spites against my father guide them. I would have made a wonderful friend if they had cared to get to know me before passing judgment.” Maglor spoke lightly, not a note of sadness for the missed friendships.

“Their loss and my gain! So, dear cousin, what brings you from your people’s camp? Did you come to leave the memory of our passing memorialized in a flower-path?”

Maglor snorted, and even this sounded musical. “No. While you might dillydally about watching the flowers grow, I am fresh from a hunt.”

“Ah, playing the great huntsman toady, are you? Celegorm wasn’t on hand?”

Maglor waved his hand through the air. “I am on the hunt for him now, as a matter of fact, and I wager it will be a more challenging hunt than the caribou. I sent my fellow hunters back to camp with our kills, but Celegorm and the twins pursued the trail of an elk herd. You know how Celegorm likes his hunting pack small. “

Maglor crossed his arms over his saddle horn. His hair spilled in a loose mass of web-fine darkness over his shoulder, only tinny braids threaded in. The Lamp bound to his chest caught in the silver of his eyes, turning them into quick-silver pools. He pulled off a casual and dashing air effortlessly. “Care to join me in my hunt?”

Fingon’s teeth flashed white in a boyish smile. “You shall need all the help you can get. I know what your tracking skills are like –or lack thereof! And if you set Celegorm loose on those elk, he has brought down the whole herd. That is more meat to haul back than the four of you can handle.”

Maglor arched a brow, “We would manage.”

“Fëanorion-ingenuity, eh?”

Maglor dazzled them with a crescent smile. “Is that envy I detect in your dulcet tones, dear cousin? Wishing you had such a teacher as our father was to us?”

Fingon shoved Maglor’s shoulder, both of them laughing when Maglor had to grab hold of his saddle horn to forgo a fall. “Come on, enough of your jabber, we have three wayward Fëanorions to track down.” 

Fingon brought his horse around, circling Maglor’s. He cantered a glance back at Glorfindel. “What do you say; are you up for a Fëanorion-hunt?”

Glorfindel looked back at Maglor. Maglor met his gaze, some of the easy humor sliding from his eyes. Maglor could not have failed to notice Glorfindel from the first, but he had avoided looking directly at him. Glorfindel held himself straight and stiff in the saddle under the Fëanorion’s gaze. They had not spoken, nor been anything but faces in a crowd, since Glorfindel had been a child seated before this cousin on a horse under Irimë’s watching eye. 

Maglor inclined his head, “Well met, Glorfindel.” 

Maglor used a greeting more appropriate for a first-meeting, for it was formal, and spread distance between them. In that one cool tilt of head and polite but aloof greeting, Glorfindel read Maglor’s intent to keep far away from the son of Irimë. It was not as if Glorfindel desired intimacy of friendship with the kind of man who would lay with a woman like his mother, but as much as he told himself Maglor’s distance didn’t bother him, it did.

“If it would not be too great an imposition, I would appreciate Fingon and your company,” Maglor said. Though Maglor used the request like an olive branch, inviting Glorfindel along, it was the kind of invitation extended because the speaker felt it the polite thing to do rather than any desire of the company for the asked.

Glorfindel shrugged, looking away, gaze landing on a newborn leaf, shinning a pale green in the Lamp’s light against the silver bark of the ash. “As you like.”

Fingon’s eyes moved between them. “Well. I could cut through this with a knife. What is going on?”

Maglor cleared his throat, drawing Glorfindel’s gaze up again. He found Maglor’s eyes on him, but this time it felt like the other truly looked at him for the first time. “Forgive me. I should not have placed your mother into this equation. She is not you. May we begin again?”

Glorfindel’s mouth clung to its downward turn, but he nodded, wary eyes upon Maglor, waiting to see what the other would do.

Maglor urged his horse forward until his leg brushed against Glorfindel’s. Maglor bent in a half-bow from his saddle. “Well met, Glorfindel. It is a pleasure to see you again. Will you ride out with Fingon and me?”

Glorfindel studied Maglor’s face, but could unearth only sincerity. Glorfindel found only kindness in those eyes. “Yes. I would like that. If you would, that is?”

Maglor’s fingers combed through his horse’s grey mane, eyes not flickering away from Glorfindel’s face. “I would like that very much.” Maglor’s smile curved mischief, and he leaned in, close enough Glorfindel could pick out the long, thick curl of his lashes. “I have a feeling I will need your help when we find my brothers. I am afraid Fingon has the bad habit of picking fights with them.”

Fingon pointed a finger at Maglor. “It is your brothers who cannot take a little teasing.”

Maglor arched a glance back. “Oh? I think I know my brothers a good deal better than you. Teasing is a healthy component of our relationships.”

“ _Fëanorion_ teasing.”

“What on earth is that?” Maglor twisted his body to drop his hand on his hip.

“It is teasing from one Fëanorion to another. A very different piece of meat entirely to a Fingolfinion teasing a Fëanorion. When it comes to me, some of your brothers have no humor at all.”

Maglor huffed, but his mouth could not conceal his amusement. “Well, perhaps you have a point. All the more reason to bring an extra along.” Maglor winked at Glorfindel, then clucked his tongue and set off through the blooming trees.

Fingon followed, but not before crowing, “Do you hear that, Glorfindel? I came out on top after an argument with a Fëanorion!”

Maglor didn’t bother to turn around as he called back: “Try not to be too annoying, Fingon, or I will not let you indulge in your illusions again.”

Fingon’s laughter rang off the trees. “I promise to try annoying you less if you promise, just for today, to not have to be right all the time.”

Maglor drawled back, “Very well, I will have mercy on your ego. I know how you hate losing.”

Fingon waited for Glorfindel to pull alongside him, before stage-whispering: “Did you hear that? Even when we are making a bet over _his_ ego he has to go and insult me.”

Maglor slid a glance back over his shoulder to them. “It is the causality of a small self-confidence that those who have more will inevitably come out the victor.”

Fingon grinned, “I shall be sure to handle you with the delicacy you deserve then. I know how you so like to be right.”

“When one is always right, the expectation that they will continue to be so prevails.”

Fingon had adopted a cocky air, riding like a careless rogue: hips tilted back as he swayed into the horse’s plod, hand lazy upon the reigns, and an indolent smile on his lips. While Maglor had tilted his nose up haughtily, using the aristocratic bones of his face and elegantly shaped hands to pull off a proper superior attitude, the kind Glorfindel had often seen on lord’s faces in court.

They passed the first few minutes of their ride amicably while Fingon and Maglor traded banter, but Glorfindel tasted the different tang of the air the moment Fingon inquired about Maedhros. Maglor stiffened, and his voice turned brusque: “He is well enough.”

Fingon frowned. “Is something the matter? Maglor, you must tell me if he needs my help. He has been avoiding me, but the last time we spoke things were tense with your father, and I—”

Maglor cut him off, “Our family survived and will continue to survive perfectly well without your assistance.” 

Fingon’s mouth flattened. “I was only trying to offer my support to my friend. Look Maglor, I thought we were over what passed between Maedhros and me in Tirion. I apologized for my loss of temper—”

Maglor twisted a look back at them, gaze pinning Fingon. “Yes, you did. But there is a difference between accepting your presence as a necessary annoyance in Foremost, and you inserting yourself into my family’s private affairs.”

“Hells, Maglor, do you have to be such an ass?”

Maglor’s lip curled. “It is a wonder you noticed any tension in my family. You do not usually look further than yourself.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Fingon snapped.

Maglor’s sneer deepened. “If you have to ask then you are a simpleton as well as self-absorbed. I meant exactly this: you do not look beyond your own nose to see who your careless behavior is hurting.”

Fingon’s temper ruled him, and his hands fisted in his reigns, knuckles flushed against his skin. “Thank you ever so much for weighing my character from that lofty perch of yours. I do not know how I would have survived another day without your self-important person pointing out my many flaws.”

Maglor eyes glinted dangerously. “Ah yes, an argument would not be complete without you throwing accusations of superiority at me. I am, after all, a Fëanorion. And everyone knows Fëanorions are disgustingly superior. Why, even the Valar have made sure to point out our arrogance will be our downfall.”

Fingon’s anger peeled off him, losing its hold as quickly as it had sunk itself. He sighed, rubbing his eyes with tired fingers. “Look. I don’t want to argue with you, Maglor. All I wanted was to hear how Maedhros fared. This has all gotten out of hand, and I admit, it was at least half my doing.” Fingon dropped his hand, and offered Maglor a crooked smile. “Friends again?”

Maglor’s face revealed nothing for a long moment, eyes holding Fingon’s in a cool clasp. But finally he tilted his head in a shallow acknowledgment. “Very well, we will put this behind us.” He turned back around in his saddle, giving them his back as he faced forward, but his voice drifted to them: “It was a pointless argument anyway.”

“Right.” Fingon sighed. 

Fingon did not brush against the prickling topic of Maedhros again, but conversation was stilted for the remainder of their hunt.


	17. Chapter 16

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 16

They stumbled upon the first dead elk, an arrow through its heart. It was only a matter of following the trail of corpses after that. They found the three hunters in a clearing where the flat, brown grass had been clipped low from many grazing muzzles. The bodies of elk littered the ground. It seemed Fingon had not been far off when he wagered Celegorm would bring down a whole herd; there were over a dozen dead elk in the clearing alone.

Celegorm and his twin brothers worked through the bodies, harvesting the meat, cutting away the fur with broad knifes, bloody fingers digging in to rip it down the animals’ backs. Celegorm stood as they rode into the clearing. His hunting knife hung from one hand, fingers curled loosely about it. His hair wore splatterings of blood like jewels, shining sleek and pale as a blade under the starlight, and his arms were coated in blood up to the elbows. 

“There you are!” Celegorm’s legs were spread in a stance of strength. The lines of his muscles coiled danger and grace as he eyed their approach like a predator sizing up its prey. “Took you long enough, Brother. But I see you brought some hired help. Good.” He smirked at Fingon, “I might even let you carry home a haunch, cousin, if you put yourself to use.”

Fingon laughed, swinging down from the saddle to land light as a hawk’s decent into the grass. “Make that two haunches –one for me, and one for Glorfindel—and you have yourself hired hands!”

“Robbery!” Celegorm’s smirk curved into a smile with teeth. “Ah, very well. But I will leave the bowels to you.”

Fingon shook his head, grinning. He turned to Glorfindel, “What do you say? Shall we grease our hands with our cousins’ fine work?”

Glorfindel’s gaze drifted passed Celegorm to the two ginger heads bend over an elk carcass. The twins had barely glanced up from their work at their coming. “I have no objections.”

“There you have it, Celegorm, two hired hands at your service.” Fingon pulled the Lamp from his breast, looping it around his saddle horn, before strolling towards Celegorm and Maglor who’d already joined his brother, rolling up his tunic sleeves as he came.

Glorfindel drifted passed them towards the twins. Fingon and Maglor appeared to have put the last of their argument behind them, setting out together upon the labor, but Glorfindel preferred to avoid any further tension. One of the twins looked up at his approach. This son of Fëanor offered no smile in welcome, and Glorfindel almost turned heel and retreated back to the security of Fingon’s familiar side. But he gathered his meager store of courage and finished his approach. 

The twins’ features were truly identical, not a single distinguishing mark to be found, but at least until such a time as they bathed and found a change of clothing, their differences could be marked in the amount of blood they wore. The one who had looked up wore as much blood as Celegorm; even his buckskin leggings bore a long strip, as if he’d wiped his knife off on them. His hair, like his twin’s, was pulled back in a high tail, falling in a plume of brilliant color passed his waist, but unlike the tidy sleekness of his twin’s mane, his had begun to pull from its hold, strands fluttering about his face, some plastered to his cheeks with blood.

The bloodier twin stopped Glorfindel in his tracks with a look. “Turn around and run back to the heels of Fingolfin’s son. Your assistance is not needed or wanted here.”

The second twin looked up from where he crouched before an elk’s opened belly. He ran an eye over Glorfindel, brow arched, mouth holding some secret amusement. This one’s face was free of any blood spatters; even his clothing had somehow avoided the mess. Unlike his twin’s and Celegorm’s buckskin and hunting greens, he wore a tunic suited to a day walking the streets of Tirion. There was even some silver embroidery stitched into the collar, blooming out from its hook-eyed clasp. He’d somehow managed to keep himself immaculate. 

“Let the boy come, Amrod. I for one do not fancy cutting out elk bladders for hours.” The twin, who must be Amras, stood and held out a knife for Glorfindel, handle first. 

Glorfindel hesitated a moment, before circling around the elk carcass to lift the knife from the outstretched palm. Amras’ weight tilted back on one hip. He stood like a collection of lazy bones, effortless elegance, and mockery curled into the line of his mouth. 

“Thank you,” Glorfindel inclined his head.

“Well now,” Amras slid a glance back as his twin, “what a polite little son of Indis we found ourselves. I rather like his pretty mouth, don’t you, Brother?”

Amrod did not pause as he plunged his hands wrist-deep in an elk and began yanking out its innards. His eyes scorched Glorfindel, nothing welcoming in their glinting grey. “Is it his pretty words or pretty mouth you like so much.”

Glorfindel’s eyes flickered back and forth between them, fingers tightening around the knife’s handle. He felt like prey of the worst kind; the kind the predator toyed with before eating.

Amras’ mouth deepened in a smirk, eye hooding. “Oh, both I imagine.” He prowled a step closer, and Glorfindel’s back stiffened, but he did not take the step back he wanted. It was the first rule of the forest: never run from a grizzly bear. “Have we frightened you, little son of Indis?”

Glorfindel titled his chin up, wishing he could meet this Elf’s eyes at level. “No. But I think you want to.”

Amras’ smirk twisted into a smile glinting teeth. “Perhaps.” He turned away, back to his brother. Glorfindel found Amrod’s eyes had not left him. There was no smile, not even a dangerous one, on this one’s mouth.

“Ah, forgive my brother his poor manners,” Amras laughed lowly. “He does not care much for traitors.”

Glorfindel’s jaw clenched. “I do not know what riddles you speak with, but I am no traitor.”

“Are you not?” Amras raised a brow, mouth curled with secret amusements and mockeries. “You follow the self-styled ‘King Fingolfin’ over the true king of the Noldor. Thus you are a traitor to the firstborn son of Finwë.”

Glorfindel’s mouth opened, but no words came to him.

“No words to defend yourself and you precious false-king with? What a pity. And here I thought you would at least have a pretty apology falling from that pretty mouth of yours. Oh well,” Amras gave Glorfindel his back, “run along now son of Indis. We have no welcome for your kind amongst us.”

Glorfindel turned on his heel and left them. He called it good riddance.

Fingon glanced up at his approach. He lifted a brow at the storm cloud settled over Glorfindel’s face, and excused himself from his cousins’ side to guide Glorfindel away. When they walked far enough their whispers would not travel back to sharp ears, Fingon lent in, bringing his mouth so close to Glorfindel’s ear all the anger fell away and he was faint from the scent of his cousin. “What happened?”

Glorfindel scrambled for his wits, pushing aside the mounting arousal he _still_ felt disgust with no matter how many times Fingolfin promised him it was alright to want this. He focused on Fingon’s eyes, but they hovered so close. So he dropped his gaze to Fingon’s perfectly shaped nose, and the line of his cheekbones. “It is nothing. Only that I do not care much for some of my Fëanorion cousins.”

“Ah, you have met Amrod.” Fingon slid a glance back at the twins. “Don’t let him concern you. He has never liked anyone who was not a Fëanorion or one of Fëanor’s people. If it makes you feel better, he has never said more than a handful of even _polite_ words to me.” Fingon smiled at Glorfindel, brushing off any passed insult like so much dust. 

“Well, he was certainly…unpleasant. But it was Amras who…he called me a traitor, all of us traitors, for not following Fëanor.”

Fingon raised a brow, “Did he now? Well if Fëanor wants us to lay aside all our doubts, he first needs to stop swearing oaths that sound like madness, and then he needs to stop talking down to everyone whose opinion does not match his own.”

Glorfindel frowned. “But he is our king. You say so as well when people disrespect him, or name Fingolfin king in Fëanor’s place.”

Fingon’s mouth grimed. “Yes, he is our king, and too many have forgotten it. But,” his settled his hands on Glorfindel’s shoulders, “people have a right to think for themselves, and protest if they believe their king is leading them wrong. It is not right for our people to name my father king, for he is not, but they do have a right to question their king: up to a point. After that point it is treason.” Fingon looked away, worry pressing its lines into the skin around his mouth and eyes. “Maybe we have already gone too far down the path of treason. I don’t know. These matters…they are complicated things, and I do not…all I can know is my own heart. And while I do not like all of Fëanor’s decisions, I follow him as much as I follow my father because he is my king.”

Glorfindel’s hand rested on his cousin’s forearm, bringing Fingon’s eyes back to him. “I follow as well.”

Fingon’s mouth tilted up in a half-smile. He squeezed Glorfindel’s shoulders before dropping his hands, “That settles it then. No traitors here.” He took a step back, looking Glorfindel over for a moment, “Do you think you would be all right heading back to camp alone? I will stay and help our cousins with their harvest –it is sure to be a lengthy ordeal—and then I plan to ride back with them and see Maedhros for myself. But I think it would be best if you headed back. If I gave you the Lamp, do you think you could make it on your own?”

Glorfindel’s shoulders lifted. “I will be fine. We are out of the mountains. I will take my time, but the most dangerous parts have passed.”

Fingon gave a slow nod. “If you are sure.”

“I am sure.”

Fingon respected Glorfindel’s judgment, and did not drag out Glorfindel’s leave-taking with fretting. He gave Glorfindel the Lamp as promised, and sent him off with one last word to be careful, and that was that. Maglor was the only one of the Fëanorions to bother raising his hand in farewell. 

Glorfindel crested the last hill to find Fingolfin and Finarfin’s camp spread out at his feet. To the north, the first glimmer of the Fëanorions camp peaked from around the lake’s bending shore. The Fëanorions had the lion’s share of the Lamps, though their people numbered half those of Fingolfin’s, but Glorfindel did not begrudge them the work of their lord’s hands and mind. 

Morgoth had plundered every last treasure, a lifetimes’ work, from Formenos’ treasuries. But Fëanor had labored long while the Darkness lay like the fumes of poisonous gas over Valinor, and his hands and the hands of the smiths he instructed beside him crafted the many Lamps the Noldor used to light their camps and the streets of Tirion. If Fëanor had claimed many of these Lamps back for the use of his followers, who could begrudge the maker the work of his hands? 

He let out a sigh of relief as he led his horse into the pastures and found none of the female handlers who’d taken a fancy to him among the horsemasters. There were no shortage of young women eager to attract the attention of a prince, and he had begun to take note of which places such women congregated, so as to avoid them.

He waved the horse handlers away, choosing to rub his horse down himself. He pulled off bridle and saddle, and began the soothing task of washing the sweat out of the roan’s coat while the horse grazed. 

He’d picked up a brush to work over the roan’s coat, when a voice at his back had his whole body stiffening as if bracing for a blow. “Will you not look at me, my son?”

He swallowed and turned to face her slowly, brush forgotten in his limp fingers. Irimë looked the same as ever, despite trading in the silk of a lady’s dress for sturdier wool. Her head still held itself with pride, and her eyes skill gazed upon him without the warmth of love.

“You are not supposed to talk to me. I will tell Uncle Fingolfin.” Glorfindel had threatened the very same the other times she’d cornered him since Fingolfin had forbidden her even the weekly visits she’d once inflicted on him. It was impossible for someone to be with Glorfindel every moment of the day, and Irimë always seemed to know when he’d be alone.

“No you won’t.” 

He hated that she knew the emptiness of his threat. He should tell Fingolfin; his uncle would find a way to keep her away for him, but he wouldn’t. Fingolfin had so many burdens, duties piled atop worries. Glorfindel could handle her himself. She was his burned to bear.

She took a step, closing another few feet of the distance between them –so little when he wanted miles. His throat worked, and his legs ached to retreat as she came even closer, but he could not give into the impulse to flee. He could not be so _weak_.

“I have missed you, my son.” Her mouth spoke the lie, brows draw together in the impression of earnestness, and he would have believed her if he did not know her like he did. It was not him she missed, but the toy he was to her, a tool to shape to her liking. She missed pretending she was a good, loving mother. She missed the purpose the task of purging his unnatural desires gave her. 

He _hated_ her. He hated what she’d turned him into. He hated the way he hated himself more. “I hate you.”

Her mouth dropped open with a gasp, shock having the audacity to paint itself over her features as if the seed of his hatred were incomprehensible to her. But the shock only lasted a heartbeat before self-assurance took up its place as front-runner again. “No you don’t. I am your mother. As hard as our mothers can be with us, as many disagreements we share with them, we can never hate them. To hate them is to hate life, for it was they who gave us its gift.” She pinned a sorrowful smile on her mouth, “You do not hate me. I am the only one who will ever go on loving you despite the unnaturalness of your desires.”

Glorfindel’s heart swelled with the secret he now slapped in her face: “My mother does.”

Irimë blinked. “Yes, I do, as I have said.”

“No, my new mother, Lady Elenwë.” Glorfindel’s chin lifted with the proclamation, the shedding of this creature before him.

The second shock burnt away even quicker than the first, twisting into a curling lip, “That soft cow?”

His eyes flared, teeth barring. “Do not talk about her like that! I told her what I am, and she did not turn away as you delighted in telling me over and over again anyone who knew would! I told her and she still loves me. She is _nothing_ like you!”

Irimë paused, face studying as she calculated her next move. She landed on something from the way she shaped her mouth into a pitying arch, “I believe you think she does, my son, but I wonder how much she _really_ understands. How did you word it? Oh, I can see it now: tears in your eyes as you confess into her arms the shadow of your filthy desires, only scraping the surface. Did you tell her you dream of kissing a good man of bravery and honor one day? You would not have told her the truth of course. You would not have told her you want to bend over and take a man’s cock inside, or how your mouth waters at the thought of Fingon making use of it, or that him fucking you like the whore you are is your deepest desire. She did not discover your unnatural tastes by finding you pleasuring yourself on your fingers as I have, did she?”

His heart sank with her every word, until the joy that had lifted it high and set him into the sky like a star had been utterly shredded, and the beauty of the moment Elenwë told him to call her mother tainted beyond repair. Only the doubt remained. The fear that it had all been an easily shattered illusion, strangled him. He had been a fool to believe Elenwë could love him, or want him as her son, if she’d _really_ understood what he was.

“No, my son,” Irimë’s voice dropped soft around him, herding him in, enclosing him in the chains of self-loathing. “Elenwë does not understand. You told her a soft version, one a woman like her, docile and sheltered, was able to give you promises of love over, but only because she does not understand what it means to dream of being fucked by a man. Her promised love is nothing but a lie. If she found you with a man inside you, using you as you want to be used, she would not be able to bear the sight of you, and her disgust would be written in every line of her face.”

Before his eyes only darkness stretched in a long, unending tunnel. The breath came sour and leaden to his lungs, and the feathers of the wings Fingolfin, Fingon, and Elenwë’s acceptance had painstakingly sewn into his heart now lay crushed in the mud at his feet. 

Irimë said more, speaking of her love, her promises to always be there for him. He took her words of love from his ears and threw them out. She had torn aside the veils of his own yearnings that had blinded him to the truth, and he hated her all the more for it. She had taken a happiness so brief, so long bereft of, into her fist and squeezed it to death, stealing it as she had stolen everything.

*

The Teleri ships bobbed like nesting gulls with folded wings, innocent and white, seeming as delicate as floating sea shells. It was hard to believe they were the silent witnesses –the _cause_ – of the bloodbath being waged on the once white shores. 

Turgon’s strained voice called him away. ‘Do not look, child, do not look.’ But he had to look. His family was done there, all of them: Fingolfin, who’d run into the already fierce battle when he’d seen his kin, his people, his _children_ fighting for their lives. Fingon, who’d let out a furious battle cry and fought his way to Maedhros’ side. And Fëanor who had already been splattered with dark, dark blood before Fingolfin’s host arrived.

Glorfindel had wanted to join them. ‘I am old enough!’ shouted like the child he still was when Turgon’s arm clamped like an anchor about his chest, wrestling him back. Turgon had finally released him when the fervor that had torn through his veins –the very same that had sent so many other Elves running down the slopes to the harbor with swords in their hands—ran its course. 

He stood at the crown of the sand dunes and felt not even a glimmer of desire to join the horror playing out before him. The sound of Idril’s weeping seemed a distant thing behind him. Elenwë’s soft voice sang comfort to her daughter as she rocked the girl who had run eagerly forward to see what the commotion was about and ended up seeing a good deal too much. Turgon was beside himself with worry over his sister, father, and brother, alternating between pacing the dune’s crest like a caged beast and retreating to fiercely embrace his tight-knit family.

Glorfindel had never heard so much screaming. Not all of it was from living mouths. Most of those fighting today had never seen an Elf suffer a violent death, but it was not a sight any of them would forget. It branded itself on the insides of their eyelids and would follow them into the world of dreams in the agonized shrieking of _fëar_ ripping from their _hröar_. 

The battle stretched on and on and exhaustion wrung his body. He saw glimpses of Irimë, the original color of her dress no longer discernible. Fëanor too he looked for, but after the first sight of his fey face he made sure not to seek it out again. There had been something _wrong_ with it. He couldn’t say what exactly, but the strange light in Fëanor’s eyes frightened him maybe more than witnessing his first death.

When it was finally over, he wandered off, feet staggering away from the sight of the slaughter. He stumbled upon Celebrimbor in a little sea cavern. Hallowed out rocks encircled a cluster of boulder-sized and ocean-smooth stones covered in barnacles, hardy starfish, and gasping mussels. Celebrimbor had a bloodied sword in his hands, its tip pointed at the earth. The dark grey of his eyes stared, unmoving, from the place the ocean met the sky. 

Soft footfalls took Glorfindel to his side, and with a nimble jump he settled himself beside Celebrimbor on the bolder. He studied the older boy’s face, though it had not turned to acknowledge his presence. The horror was there. The same horror that had painted all the bloodied Noldor after the madness of battle had cleared. 

It wasn’t the same kind of horror that the son’s of Fëanor had worn as they carried news of Finwë’s murder to Tirion, or the one Glorfindel had felt watching the battle. It went deeper, spawned from the darkness of knowing it was _them_ who had done the deed. Not Morgoth. Not the distant Valar. Them.

Celebrimbor didn’t speak, and Glorfindel didn’t know how to break the silence. Some things could not be undone, and could never be forgotten. 

He made sure to keep his body relaxed and not stiffed in surprise when Celebrimbor leaned into him. The older boy’s chest pressed into his back as Celebrimbor slowly, as if bracing himself for the inevitable rejection, let his head fall into the crook of Glorfindel’s shoulder. 

After a minute, Glorfindel built up the courage to slip his fingers around the bloody sword’s hilt and push it from Celebrimbor’s hands. It fell on to the rocks below with a clang, and Glorfindel filled its absence with his own hand. Celebrimbor’s clammy fingers squeezed him back with such force it bled into pain. But Glorfindel did not pull away. He tried to keep from looking down at their clasped hands. He didn’t want to think about the blood caked into Celebrimbor’s knuckles and digging underneath his nails.


	18. The one your soul marries

Intermission: The one your soul marries

The sounds of the battle reached them long before Fingon led his section of his father’s host over the last sand-dune and caught his first glimpse of the harbor. He didn’t know the sounds he heard were those of battle, he’d never been in one before, but there was so much screaming. His men had come running behind him, their legs burning but not feeling it next to the terror in their hearts. 

Fingon had thought Morgoth must have launched another attack on Valinor. But even when he saw it was Elves fighting Elves, he didn’t hesitate to rush in head-first, drawing his sword as he came, shouting out all the fear in his lungs (Maedhros, where was Maedhros. Maehdros, Maehdros, Maedhros, pounding through his blood like the beat of his heart).

He fought, knowing no taste of fear for himself, all his terror had been reserved for the horror stuffing his throat at the thought of coming across Maedhros’ body on the sands, blood pouring out from horrendous wounds that no healer could ever mend and eyes dull. There could be no greater crime in the world than Maedhros’ death, no existence more unimaginable than one without Maedhros within it.

A thousand fears played out behind his eyes as he cut through the bodies separating him from Maedhros’ side. He saw Maedhros die a hundred different ways, each time needing Fingon to save him and Fingon being too far away; Fingon couldn’t get to him, couldn’t get to him before that pale, outstretched hand fell limp into blood-soaked sand. He swore a thousand oaths in his heart that he would rip Mandos to pieces, break apart the Earth itself, tear open the veils between life and death and _pull_ Maedhros back to his side by sheer _will_ if Maedhros should be gone from this life.

Finally, finally, he saw him. Maedhros fought, surround by his brothers and father under a banner with the star of his father upon it. They were in the thick of the fighting, arrows pounding into their shields as they led their people’s spear-head of attack. They pushed into the line of defense the Teleri had raised behind a blockage of overturned wagons, stacked barrels and crates, and the skeletons of half-built ships from which they rained their deadly arrows down upon the Fëanorions.

Blood smeared the front of Maedhros armor, his sword red with it, even his face and hair not spared the assault. It was in that moment, watching Maedhros’ sword slice through a Teler’s chest, star-bright eyes burning as he cut down the one who’d tried to thrust through Amrod’s defense, that Fingon knew he looked upon the one he loved. 

A battle raged around him, but this moment was as good as any other to get hit with what he’d been far too slow to realize. There would be no perfect moment to realize he’d been a fool.

Maedhros had always been there: a steady presence at his elbow, the shoulder he lent into and spilled all his secrets to when he’d gotten too deep in the cups, the face he longed to see when his store of energy and cheer ran dry and he found himself faced with nagging doubts. Nothing serious back then, before the Banishment that was the first rumble of the earthquake that would shatter their lives, just a handful of shames at not being a better son, a fistful of regrets for plowing through so many women like a hungry wolf that was never satisfied, a locked chest full of missed moments with Guilin, but compared to what came After, they were like the remorse of childhood. Yet Maedhros listened to them all, even when he must have thought Fingon juvenile.

But that was the way of it. Maedhros listened as Fingon shared everything, but revealed little of his own innermost thoughts. Fingon thought he understood, at long last, why that was; or he hoped he did. He didn’t know Maedhros’ heart, but he would.

The world didn’t stand still while he got hit over the head with his blindness. The glimpse of Maedhros was snatched away again as the battle surged around him. He couldn’t draw breath without Maedhros within his sight. He needed to be right there at his side, sword cutting between Maedhros and death.

He fought with all the desperation in his heart, until he’d hacked his way to Maedhros’ side. Fëanor’s followers opened their ranks to let him reach their lords at Maedhros’ shouted order, and then Maehdros’ hand was on his shoulder, eyes raking over Fingon with a desperation to match the one pounding in Fingon’s breast.

“Stay close.” Maedhros’ fingers dug into Fingon’s shoulder, sinking right down into the flesh, for nothing but a tunic separated Fingon’s skin from Maedhros.’ He and his men had not woken up expecting a battle this morning. 

Fingon’s hand –bloodied—cupped Maedhros’ elbow, the armor slipping slick under his grip. So many words piled up in his throat like leaves, but confession was not for this moment. All he got through the mess in his throat was, “Don’t you dare die. Don’t you _dare_.”

“No one is dying today,” Maedhros’ eyes flashed hot and fierce as a panther’s. With that they dove back into the thick of it.

The battle ended with a jarring abruptness, as if both sides woke up from the same dream –nightmare—coming back to their senses at the same moment. The last of the Teleri still fighting on the docks turned and fled into the city the fighting had only just brushed up against, and Fëanor pulled up his own forces, forgoing a pursuit. 

The absent sounds of clashing metal, the screams of fresh wounds and death, the smack of arrows punching into flesh, the shouts of leaders and those drunk on some kind of madness, did not herald in silence. The wounded and dying cluttered the docks, bodies stacked atop bodies until every inch of wood and sand was slick with blood; even the sea’s color had been stained from the bodies floating face-up in it. The sound of weeping from an agony of the soul did not come only from the wounded though. Elves –Noldor—huddled over the bodies of their dead and ones they’d killed, and wept out the horror in their souls.

Fingon’s hand found Maehdros,’ fingers digging in until his knuckles whitened. Maedhros’ squeezed him back. Now that the terror of Maedhros’ death receded, what he’d done to reach Maedhros’ side vomited itself up through his mind in flashes of horror, and maybe the worst: when he cut through flesh and felt a spark of pleasure that this one, this one at least had not reached Maehdros, and the terrible relief washing through him when another Noldo fell before them but it was not Maedhros or him who that arrow struck.

“My family needs me, and your father and sister will be in need of you,” Maedhros gave his hand a last squeeze, and untangled their hands.

Maedhros spoke truth, but Fingon’s hand still felt empty and lost without Maedhros’ inside it. He felt like, if he were to step away from Maedhros’ side, he would fall off the face of the Earth; tip over from the shear horror of the slaughter about him and the knowledge that he had shared in this. 

They had done this, whatever this was and whatever it had been done for, his people had been involved, both as the ones with the swords in hand and the ones dying, chests punctured with arrows, limbs severed by knives. Whatever this was, it had been wrong, everything about it was wrong. Something like this shouldn’t exist in the world.

Maedhros and he parted, their families and duties pulling them apart, but Fingon would be back. He wasn’t finished with Maedhros; he would never be finished. 

He sought out his men, learning of the deaths of friends, men he had known since they were carefree boys together. He organized what help he could find for the wounded. There were so few with any training in healing, and most of those had never tended such wounds as these. 

The numbers of wounded staggered and the collecting had only just begun, yet it did not surprise him to learn most of the bodies littering the sands were not those of the dead. He’d felt it himself, even caught in that desperation to reach Maedhros: the instinctual resistance to killing. He slashed, he cut, but thrust? Puncture lungs, heart, gut, _decapitate_? The idea revolted, everything inside him turning from the very thought of it. 

The Teleri had felt it too, that primal resistance to killing one with a face so like their own. Few of the dead had been killed by a sword or spear’s work. Arrows had been the true killers.

He sought out his father and sister next, finding them together. He’d seen glimpses of both on the battlefield with him. They, like him, had charged to the defense of their people and kin. 

When his father saw him coming, boots sinking into sand moist and dark with all the blood it had drunk, he ran to him. Fingon had seen his father run after his little sister and Guilin, but never like this, never with that desperation in his eyes, that relief on his face so sharp it struck like pain. His father crushed him in his arms, raining kisses down on his brow, his cheeks, voice so choked it caught like sobs in his chest as he told Fingon he loved him, he loved him, he loved him, and don’t ever, _ever_ , put himself in danger like that again, he could have _died_ ; he couldn’t lose him, he couldn’t lose him.

Fingon crushed his father back, feeling a child again, but uncaring if he wept in his father’s arms. He needed these arms around him, these strong arms like a mountain’s love, the rock he balanced on, the guide he slipped his hand into and followed with complete trust and the conviction that he would never be led astray in these arms. A son could never find a better father than Fingon’s.

Fingolfin took him and Aredhel by their hands –still stained in blood like his own—when the desperation of their relief at finding each other among the living had ebbed. He looked deep into their eyes, face grim but set with determination and the passion of conviction sunk into all the pores of his face. “I want you to listen to me very closely, do you understand?” They gave him their promise, hands clinging to each other’s hands in the circle the three of them made together. “Whatever happens, whatever is revealed about this battle and its causes, you must never doubt that you did the right thing today. You fought in defense of those you love, in defense of our people’s lives, and whatever the reasons that brought those lives into danger, it does not change that you fought for love and loyalty. You did nothing wrong, do you understand?”

Fingon’s chest swelled with so much love he thought his heart would come bursting up through his skin. He squeezed his father’s hand; his father who loved them and would never ever stop. “I know, Father. It won’t be easy, we…we killed, and I don’t think something like that…I don’t think it will ever fully leave us, but we did the right thing in coming to our cousins’ defense. It is this whole thing that is wrong, not protecting those we love. Never that.” 

More words and embraces were passed around. Fingolfin urged them to wash the blood and filth off. Fingon thought this a needless indulgence, but as he joined a line of other bloodied men in the sea, he understood. The sea slapped their flesh like raking fingers, the waves pulling in and out with merciless power, but washing his skin clean and pulling on clothes unstained by the deeds of the day was an act of cleansing that reached deeper than the skin.

But what brought peace to his soul was not just the physical cleansing of the evidence of his deeds this day from his skin, it was the company he shared the experience with. His people bathed beside him in the sea, offering each other companionship in a world lit only by starlight and the harsh burn of torches.

A man he didn’t know the name of began it. Fingon never asked the man’s name because what they spoke of went so much deeper than names. The man stood on the beach, not yet joining them in the sea. He stared at nothing; just out at the place the starry sky met the heaving breast of the ocean. One of the men called him to them, come away from the memories ready to pounce on them all. 

The man turned his eyes from the horizon to them and said in a voice soft yet carrying, “I suppose it is justice I messed myself like an infant.” 

Silence followed this pronouncement, before another soft confession dropped: “I…I did too.” Another: “I thought I was the only one.” More followed, the stone of secret shamed lifted from their chests. Not all had, but none of those that hadn’t curled their lips in scorn. 

Eyes shied away from meeting Fingon’s though, ashamed to have confessed such a weakness before one of their princes even if they were no longer alone. Fingon would not cling to the pillar of pride and sacrifice the bonds forming right here, between souls in dark. “Well, I pissed myself, so I suppose we are even.”

Laughter followed his words; the relief so sharp in these men’s hearts it carried the edge of hysteria. If their prince had not had control of his body’s movements, then surely there could be no shame in this. 

The confessions did not stop there; they had only begun. A man sent spinning into the trust they spun between them like cords of steel, unbreakable: “When I killed him. It felt…it felt good. Satisfying.”

A moment the length of two breaths, before: “I…I felt that too. I thought…only he didn’t get me, did he? I got him first.” More confessions followed, not near as many as those who had a confession of loose bladder or bowels, and the air teetered between acceptance and drawing away from these Elves who had confessed even the smallest pleasure in their kills. 

Fingon dropped into it: “I felt it too. I think it must be a natural response to surviving. Take no shame from it. You all fought bravely.” He did not say he had feared there was something wrong with him when he too had felt that surge of satisfaction when he cut down one who would have cut him down. His men didn’t need to hear that, They needed to hear their prince had experienced the exact same thing, and it was alright.

“I did not fight with bravery, my lord.” A new man confessed. “I could not…when the time came, I could not kill him. I sliced his hand though, so he could not use his bow, but I could not finish it.”

“I did not kill either. We…he and I…we could not do it. His eyes…Forgive me, my prince, I failed our people.”

“No, there is nothing to forgive,” Fingon spoke with conviction, “this too is natural, for are they not Elves as we are? It cannot be in our nature to kill each other easily. Yet if we find the ability to do so, let us not take shame into ourselves if you found satisfaction in surviving. Both of these are natural. You have shown yourself of good soul to find killing repugnant, and those who can kill have shown they have the ability to protect that which they love to the last, and that too is good.”

He had no evidence but his heart that what he spoke was true. None of them knew anything about war before today, but they were learning, oh how they were learning. The men took heart from his words, finding absolution within them, as Fingon found peace for his own self-doubts within their confessions.

When he left the waters and crossed back to his father’s banner and the hastily assembled camp beneath it, he passed many bodies lying prone in the sand. They were not dead, but fast asleep. Exhaustion dragged at his own mind, making his head swim and his limbs rebel against him. He stumbled the last few meters to his father’s banner. Fingolfin met him with an arm slipped about his waist, and led him over where a blanket spread out over the sand with Aredhel already curled up inside, black hair tangled around her.

“Rest now,” Fingolfin kissed his brow as he tucked him to bed like a child. 

“The Teleri—”

“Everything is fine. I set a watch on Alqualondë, and Fëanor as well. Turgon is bringing the rest of our people down from the dunes and Finarfin’s host has arrived. The battle will not begin afresh. And if this strange exhaustion is taking most of our men who fought, then it will afflict the Teleri as well, I think. Now rest.”

Fingon made to ask why Fingolfin himself wasn’t struck down by the exhaustion as well, but he slipped into sleep before his sluggish tongue could wrap itself around the words.

He awoke in stages, but eventually the last of the sleep slipped from his mind. He couldn’t say how much time had passed. Fëanor had invented a means of measuring the time, but whoever had the current hour would have to be tracked down; it wasn’t as simple as blinking sleep out of his eyes and being able to judge morning from night by the shade of the light.

He rolled up to a seated position. The blanket his father had tucked about him slipped down to his waist. Aredhel’s soft breathing came from his right, and he unwrapped the blanket from himself and draped it over her before rising. He found his father spread out on his own blanket, fast asleep, with Guilin tucked against his strong chest. 

Fingon knelt beside them, reaching out to brush the hair back from his son’s face, only for his fingers to encounter a bandaged wrapped around Guilin’s brow. How had his son come to be injured? He should have been safe up on the dunes with Turgon.

Fingolfin stirred, head rising from the pillow he’d made of his arm. His hair shifted like a dark, restless sea as he rose to his elbow, spilling over his shoulders. Fingolfin’s fingers joined his on Guilin’s brow. His father’s voice fell low and heavy as a dead body between them, “He followed us down, into the battle. I thought—I thought Turgon had him. I should have…” He took in a shaky breath. “They found him when we collected the wounded. He had been crushed under the weight of a fallen Noldo, and had taken a blow to the head. Being mistaken for the dead was probably the only thing that spared his life.”

Fingon closed his eyes, hand seeking out his father’s shoulder in the dark, needing its sturdiness, its strength. He hadn’t even _thought_ about his son. A proper father would have. And now his failings as a father had hurt Guilin more than any nights missed tucking him into bed, absent discipline, or perches on top fences rails ever could. His son could have _died_ , and he hadn’t even spared a stray thought to where Guilin was during that madness. He should have. He should have—

“It is not your fault, Fingon.”

His eyes snapped open and met his father’s grieved face. “No more than it is yours, and yet you would blame yourself as well.”

“You and I both know he is as much a son to me as he is yours. And the fault lies at my door, for he was in my company, not yours, when I chose to go running into the battle. I do not regret that choice, not with you there fighting before me, and my nephews and Fëanor, but I should have taken more care with Guilin, should have made sure Turgon knew I passed him into his watch, should have—”

“That is enough.” Fingon squeezed his father’s shoulder. “We made a mistake, a terrible one, but Guilin is alive. He lives and this will never, _ever_ , happen again. We made a mistake. Now we can either fall to it or learn from it.”

Fingolfin’s hand came up to Fingon’s on his shoulder, covering it. Fingolfin took in deep breath, eyes holding Fingon’s, and a trembling smile taking his mouth. “Have I told you today how much I adore you?”

Fingon’s breath whooshed out in laugh, but Fingolfin’s face blurred about the edges from the wetness. “Now you have, Father.”

His father’s hands came up to frame Fingon’s face and bring his brow down to kiss with his. “Fingon, my dear son.” Fingon smiled into the touch, and relaxed against Guilin’s side. Their faces pulled away, but they sat long with Guilin curled between them.

Eventually Fingon rose and took leave of his father. He turned his face back to the sea bobbing with bodies and white ships. 

The followers of Fëanor had gathered up the last of their wounded, and now worked on bringing their dead to lay with honor, preparing them for a funeral pyre. The fleet of swan ships sat low in the water, piled with the wounded. Their decks dripped blood down their sides, making them resemble the white, gleaming teeth of a wolf.

His feet rooted in the sand as realization slammed into his chest. This had been about the ships. Of course it had. He couldn’t even say he was surprised, or that he didn’t understand. They’d all walked through the Wastes of Araman where the mountains ringed them in on the west, the sea on the east, and frozen tundra stretched out on and on until it turned to creaking ice and winds so freezing an Elf could die from exposure alone. 

He understood how this had happened. He’d felt the hands tightening around their necks, the walls squeezing them in. (Trapped, trapped, trapped, like flies drawn into the net. They couldn’t get out, they couldn’t get out! How sweet the honey of Valinor must have looked to those Elves caught in the darkness of starlight, but oh how skillful the Valar’s web!) He could understand, but that didn’t mean he condoned. Maedhros and he would be having a talk about what happened here, oh yes they would, but not until Maehdros learned Fingon was in love with him.

Fingon kept walking. He couldn’t spot Maedhros. Celegorm and the twins knelt among the healers, putting skills Fingon had never know they possessed to use. Maglor and Caranthir organized the arrangement of the dead, and walked through their people, raising the ones who still wept over their kills up with strengthening words of absolution, and pressing hands of comfort into the shoulders of those who wept on the bodies of loved ones with sightless eyes.

Fëanor, Maedhros, and Curufin he could not find though. As Fingon drew close, Maglor and Caranthir closed ranks against him. “What do you want?” Caranthir began the attack. He’d never liked Fingon.

Maglor’s hand landed on his brother’s shoulder, meeting Fingon’s eyes. “Maedhros is meeting with the Teleri to negotiate collection of their wounded and dead. Whatever it is will have to wait.”

“Wha-alone?” Fingon’s heart leapt into his throat, stealing all the breath from his lungs.

“Of course not. A guard went with him, and Finarfin as well.”

Fingon crossed his arms over his chest. “Then I will wait. Right here.”

“Be gone,” Caranthir flung out his hand. “We know why you are here. Come to call Maedhros a coward again? Come to blame him for this too?”

Fingon’s mouth set. “No.”

Caranthir took a step closer, trailing a storm of wrath behind him. “I don’t believe you. You showed your true colors already. We will not forget. Ever.”

Fingon’s chin tilted up to meet Caranthir’s dark-fire eyes. He did not shy away from honesty; he was a man who could admit a mistake. “I should not have said those things, but Maedhros has forgiven me for them, and he is the only forgiveness that concerns me. Now, you can stand here throwing insults at me, or you can go tell Maedhros I would like a word with him.”

Caranthir looked ready to continue with the insults, but Maglor’s hand restrained his brother. “Father asked one of us to begin taking a roll of any of our people who have pervious skills in sailing; you are perfect for this task. Go serve our people, Brother.” 

Caranthir sliced Maglor a rebellious look, but Maglor lifted a brow back. Maglor was the second born, the third in line to the throne, by all the customs of their people, Caranthir must bow to the will of his elder brother.

Maglor leaned in and whispered something in Caranthir’s ear. Caranthir’s face did not lose its black bend, but he did stalk off, turning a dismissive back on Fingon. The face Maglor turned back to Fingon looked like a stranger’s. They all looked like stranger in the darkness. Blood still speckled Maglor’s cheeks, and a shutteredness, a hardness was in the set of his mouth Fingon had never seen before. 

Maglor had always had a sensitive mouth, free with smiles and smirks. At least Fingon thought Maglor had, but it seemed a very long time since Maglor joined him beneath a sycamore tree to watch Maedhros and Fëanor spar before they took their own turn with the sword training. There hadn’t been any need to conceal the swords, up North in Foremost. Everyone knew everyone else had forged them, and Fingon’s heart aligned more closely with the Fëanorions’ in this than the people back in Tirion: Melkor was a threat, and the Valar weren’t going to do anything about it.

“The House of Fëanor sends its appreciation to the House of Fingolfin for its loyalty,” Maglor gave him a nod with the words. Everything from the color of the words to the expression on Malgor’s face reminded Fingon of his father when Fingolfin withdrew deep into the role of prince.

Fingon cut to the core, “We would do no less for our kin and people, but this whole thing in a mistake, cousin, and you know it.”

Maglor’s face remained closed. “I know my brothers and father live, and I know we have secured a means to escape this prison. That is what I know.”

“Right.” Fingon snorted. But all the irritation drained out of him the next moment. “I will not be dissuaded from what I know in my heart: this was wrong. But I am glad we all came out of it alive.” He crossed the distance between them and engulfed Maglor in an embrace. 

Maglor stood stiff for a moment, before he relaxed and slipped his arms around Fingon’s waist, sighing into Fingon’s hair. “It is good to see you alive as well. If for no other reason than Maedhros would have been impossible to live with if you had gotten yourself killed,” Maglor pulled back with a smile, and Fingon found himself laughing.

“Go on up,” Maglor nodded at the ship moored directly behind them. “I will send Maedhros your way when he returns. It should not be long now. Father is with Curufin below, so you will miss them,” his mouth lifted knowingly, before his voice dropped low, “Curufin took a Teler’s arrow to his shoulder. The wound is not fatal –his armor blunted the worst of it—but you know my father, he cannot stand to see one of us in pain.”

Fingon smiled and touched Maglor’s shoulder as he passed, and made his way up the ship’s gang plank. Wounded packed the deck, a trickle being taken below, one stretcher at a time through the narrow stairs leading to the hull. Most of these Elves had already been tended to by a healer, but a few healers still flitted here and there to see to the minor wounds, having done all they could for the serious injuries.

Fingon couldn’t stand there idle, so he offered his hands. He carried the Fëanorions’ wounded into the hull for what might have been a half turn of the hour or might have been four, before Maedhros returned. Fingon came up on the deck to fetch the next round, and found Maedhros in conversation with one of his lords. The skin around Maedhros’ eyes and mouth pulled tight with weariness, but his eyes still burned with purpose. As long as there were tasks yet to complete, people yet to serve, Maedhros would not rest.

Maedhros looked over as Fingon approached and smiled, all the weariness slipped out of his eyes, and strode over to meet him. They met halfway, their hands reaching up and out to meet at fingertips. In that one smile, that one touch, everything set to right again in the world. This was why he’d killed. This was why he would not regret it.

“Maedhros,” Fingon’s mouth lifted in a crooked smile, full of fondness, so much fondness. His eyes soaked in Maedhros. 

Maedhros had shed his armor and washed the battle filth and blood away. His eyes were pure and luminous in the starlight. His cheekbones cast shadows on his cheeks; his perfect, straight nose another. He had delicate, expressive brows, and they lifted under Fingon’s appraisal. 

“Is something wrong?” Maedhros searched his face. 

Fingon swallowed, “No. No, everything is perfect.”

“Oh, Fingon,” Maedhros shook his head at him, “only you could find those words on a day such as this.”

Fingon’s smile turned cheeky. “I knew you had to have a reason for keeping me around. That cynical world view of yours needs me to keep it from running away with you.”

“Pragmatism, not cynicism,” Maedhros corrected with a haughty tilt of his head, mouth holding all the humor in its shape. 

Fingon couldn’t bear to keep looking into a face so far passed simple beauty, belonging to a being he’d given his wholeness to, every part of himself, never to want returned, without telling Maedhros that he loved him, he loved him, he loved him. Maedhros may turn away, mouth folding with sadness for a love confessed he could not return, or his eyes might darken, disturbed, but Fingon would take that chance. He knew himself now, knew what he wanted if he could have anything in the world, and he wouldn’t hesitate to jump for it. 

“There is something I would speak to you of. In private.” Maehdros gaze turned wary. He pulled his hands from Fingon’s. “No, I am not going to jump down your throat for not being able to stop your father. I…I never should have blamed you for what happened in the square. I am sor—”

“I forgave you for that long ago. Let us not speak of it again.” 

Forgave, but not forgotten. If Maedhros had been able to trust Fingon his first thought wouldn’t have been Fingon’s ugly reaction to what had happened here today. But Fingon had damaged that trust –not broken, but he’d let his temper, his fear for his father and fury with Fëanor rule him. He’d lashed out and hurt the one person who would take it from him but who deserved it least.

“I promise it is nothing like that.” They would speak of this day later, but it would be nothing like the daggers of accusations Fingon had hurled at Maedhros in the square.

“Very well, give me a moment to finish up with Fuinnith.” Fingon nodded, watching as Maedhros walked back to the Elf Fingon had mistake for a male at first glance. The woman wore full armor, half her face concealed by a tall helm.

Maedhros gave a last few instructions on guard patrols and what the Fëanorions’ policies would be regarding the Teleri picking their wounded up from the Fëanorion healers and their dead off the beach, before he led Fingon down into the ship’s hull. He had to ask directions to what accommodations his father had arranged for his sons, and they were directed towards the provided cabin.

Fingon shut the door behind them as Maedhros sank onto the side of a bed tucked into a cove in the wall to maximize the cabin’s space. Maedhros let out a groan, lying back on the mattress widthwise. His boots stayed planted on the floor, and the length of his body was so long his shoulders met the cabin’s wall before he was able to stretch out fully.

Maedhros titled him a tired smile. “I will just lie here a moment, how is that?”

Fingon pushed off from the door he’d leaned his weight against to saunter across to Maedhros. “You better not fall asleep on me. I have very important matters to discuss with you. Life and death sorts of things.”

Maedhros snorted. “Tell Fingolfin my father will discuss the future of the Noldor with him later.”

“Do you take me for an idiot? I am not getting saddled with that. I will not be getting within a mile of anything to do with Fëanor, my father, and the future of the Noldor. Well, maybe, if you promise not to fall asleep.” 

Maedhros closed his eyes, mouth curling around a smirk. “Such demands. And you have not even said anything interesting. No, Prince Fingon, I think I will fall asleep whenever I please.”

Fingon reached Maedhros’ side, looking down at his face. “What if I help you with your boots? Is that an acceptable trade for your continued presence in the land of the waking?”

Maedhros cracked an eye open. “Would you really?”

Fingon got down on his knees with an exaggerated show. “I am at the crown prince’s command.”

Maedhros sat up, the movement spreading his knees for Fingon. His eyes glinted as he purred, “Yes, I am your prince, aren’t I? Maybe I should just keep you as my permanent boot-remover, to serve me at my pleasure.”

Fingon’s smile slipped away, leaving only breathlessness and parted lips. “I would make a terrible boot-remover. You know me; I would either get bored and wander off or throw one of your prized boots at your head for being such a stuck-up slave-driver.”

Maedhros laughed, face so beautiful it hurt. His mouth lovely, eyes shining, hair falling around him in waves of copper Fingon didn’t care what was dried in. Maedhros had looked magnificent covered in blood.

“Fingon, what is wrong?” Maedhros brows drew together, eyes seeking out all the corners of Fingon’s face.

“I have been a fool, a blind, bloody fool, for so long.”

“What has happened?” Maedhros, dear Maedhros, put his hand on Fingon’s shoulder, eyes overflowing with concern.

“I rather missed the fact I was in love with you.”

The air sucked out of Maedhros’ lungs. His face spasmed, a kaleidoscope of emotions running over it. His fingers dug into Fingon’s shoulder as if to anchor himself to the earth, before everything slammed shut behind a mask Fingon knew so well, for Maedhros toted it out in public, but never here, with him. “You should not say whimsical things like that. Today has been—”

“It is not whimsical. I love you like I have wasted all these years thinking I would love a woman when I was in love with you the whole time.”

“Stop.” Maehdros drew his hand slowly, carefully off Fingon’s shoulder, the movement so controlled it hurt to watch. “You thought I would die. It is only natural you should be experiencing some heightened emotions, but you cannot—you cannot just say things like this. They mean things, and you…you will not mean them in the morning, and—”

“Maedhros,” Fingon stretched up, still on his knees and sliding his body between Maedhros’ spread knees to reach his beloved’s face, touching Maedhros’ jaw with his fingers. “You know me. I have never once claimed to love another in this way. Not once. I don’t say things like this I don’t mean with everything I am.”

Maedhros’ chest heaved, breaths yanking in rapid and harsh. The mask peeled aside, nothing but rawness underneath, the rawness of a hope that stole the breath out of Fingon’s lungs in a twist of joy and agony, for that hope, etched down to the bones of Maedhros’ face, was like looking into the face of a starving man, a man who had been starving for a very long time.

Fingon said ‘I love you’ with his hands as they traveled the curves of Maedhros’ face into his hair, pulling it back from Maedhros’ face, the sharpness of Maedhros’ cheekbones highlighted all the more without the hair framing the shape of his face. “All this time and we could have—” Maedhros gripped his shoulders, silencing the regrets. “How long have you…?” Fingon asked because he needed to know, even if he cringed away from the terrible knowledge.

“Always.”

Fingon choked on a gasp. Always. It was a knowledge too all-encompassing and horrifying in its length to contemplate. 

Maedhros’ hands caged his wrists, wrapping tight, possessive, around them. “Tell me. Tell you are mine. Mine and only mine. No other unworthy hands upon you from this moment until the world breaks open.”

“I am yours. No one else, Maedhros, never again. Just you and me, for always.”

A sound half sob half growl ripped from the back of Maedhros’ throat as he surged down and claimed Fingon’s mouth. Fingon rose up to meet it, kissing back, hard. 

Maedhros’ arms wrapped like vines, like possession around his waist, hands running all over the muscles in his back, the line of his spine, plunging down to explore the shape of his ass. Fingon groaned and pressed their chests together, grabbing handfuls of Maedhros’ hair as their tongues slid against each other for the first time. 

Maedhros tasted of something spicy; with a hint of blood’s metallic tang on the underside of his tongue as if he’d swallowed the blood of the Elves he broke on their way to his brothers. Fingon’s fingers found the hem of Maedhros’ tunic, finding the silky skin of Maedhros’ abdomen, feeling it rise and fall under his touch, the sleek muscles pressing up against his thumbs rubbing every inch of that skin they could reach. It was so soft and smooth he could spend hours with only these few inches of Maedhros under his hands and not grow tired of touching him.

Maedhros’ ended the kiss with a nip against Fingon’s lip, and a maddening tease, pulling back only to dive back in for one more taste. When the kiss broke for the last time, Maedhros leaned his forehead against his. Their breaths panted in the air between their mouths, inches between where one of them ended and the other began.

Maehdros’ hands came up to gather Fingon’s braids. “Let me take these out.”

His mouth quirked, “You know my hair is a wild mess without braids.”

“I love your hair,” Maedhros’ fingers traveled the length of one of the thick braids, “do you remember the first time I saw you? You had your hair down. There were cherry blossom caught in it. You were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.” 

Maedhros unraveled the first ribbon, and Fingon’s hands came up to join in the work. The ribbons fell one by one to the floor. It felt like he stripped himself slowly under Maedhros’ gaze. When the last ribbon loosed, Maedhros combed out the braids until Fingon’s hair hung in sinuous black curls and waves passed his waist. Maedhros buried his hands in it, up to the wrists. 

He brought his face to Fingon’s neck, inhaling him, mouth parting, lips brushing over the column of Fingon’s throat, kissing the underside of his jaw. “So long, Fingon. I have waited for you so long.” 

Fingon squeezed his eyes, hand coming up to bite into his knuckles and stop the tears. Maedhros’ words had come up like the groaning of his soul, and ache of need and longing that he had know most of his adult life, for years and years and years while Fingon ran around, spending himself on dozens of meaningless trysts, while Maedhros had to watch it all, yet never, ever, left his side, never once allowing the love to twist into bitterness. 

Fingon did not deserve Maedhros; how could he? Maedhros was as perfect as they came. Everything, everything about him, from the way his lip could curl and throw superior words like knifes when his temper raged, to the way he knew exactly what would bring a smile to each one his brothers’ mouths, to the way he moved through a room with a dancer’s stride, all elegance and poise, to the way he could close up his face and all the soft places in his heart and _finish_ an opponent.

Maedhros’ fingers continued to curl in his hair, and he used the hold to pull Fingon’s neck back. He didn’t kiss him yet; he pulled back and just _looked_ at Fingon. At the way Fingon’s eyes fluttered, lips parted, neck arched back like an offering. Maedhros’ hands tightened to fisting in his hair. “Tell me you are mine.”

“Only if you take off that tunic.”

Maedhros darted in and grazed his teeth over the lobe of Fingon’s ear. “ _Tell me_.”

Fingon turned into the mouth. “Are you going to get undressed for me or not?”

“Only after I rip these clothes off you.”

“Don’t you dare. I am not walking back half naked. It would be just my luck to run into your father, or one of your less _merry_ brothers looking like I got mauled by a bear.”

Maedhros laughed lowly into his neck, smile pressed against Fingon’s skin, before he pulled back. His eyes danced as he unwound his hands from Fingon’s hair. He leaned back on his hands, elbows locking, hair falling in a cascade of beauty to pool behind him in the bed. He had an infuriating, delicious smirk on his mouth. “I am waiting.”

Fingon huffed a laugh, and rose to his feet.

Maedhros lifted his leg, rotating his booted foot.

“I don’t think so.”

Maedhros arched a brow. Fingon wanted to kiss that mouth, kiss Maedhros breathless and moaning for him. “You said you wanted me undressed. How much do you want it, sweetheart?” Maedhros’ smirk was delicious. His eyes dropped pointedly to his boot. “Boots come first. I did hear you volunteering not so long ago.”

Fingon tossed his hair over his shoulder, hands dropping to his waist and slowly beginning on his belt’s buckle, locking eyes with Maedhros. “If you see something you want you will have to take your own clothes off to get it.”

“Is that so?” Maedhros’ eyes dropped to fasten on Fingon’s fingers. The belt felt to the floor with a clunk, and Maedhros licked his lips. 

Fingon pulled his tunic up over his shoulders, hair falling behind it soft as a cloud’s landing. He hadn’t put on an undershirt when he changed after the battle, and stood with chest bare before Maedhros. Maedhros’ hands started working on his own boot, flicking the buckles back and yanking it off with impressive speed, not taking his eyes off Fingon as Fingon put on a show of removing his own boots.

By the time Fingon kicked off his leggings to stand naked in the middle of the room, Maedhros had his own tunic and undershirt off, only his leggings remaining. Fingon took mercy on him when Maedhros reached out for him, despite the absence on Maedhros’ own nakedness. It was impossible to resist the creature on the bed, miles of creamy skin begging to be explored and caressed for days, weeks, worshiped like Maedhros’ perfection deserved to be worshiped.

He came to stand between the knees Maedhros spread in welcome. Maedhros put his hands on Fingon’s bare hips, thumbs brushing hipbones, and tried to coax him into his lap, but he dropped his hands on Maedhros’ shoulders (pausing a moment to marvel at the feel of them under his palms, wanting to kiss all the little freckles dotting them), and pushed Maedhros hard, toppling him back into the bed and climbed atop him.

Fingon looked down at the divine creature under him. Maedhros’ hair spilled about him on the bed like a starburst of copper waves, lips reddened from their kisses. Fingon lowered his mouth to kiss down Maedhros’ jaw to the place it met his ear and breathed, “I want you. _Now_.” 

“Yessss.” Maedhros’ hands slid down to cup Fingon’s ass, pressing their groins together, rolling up into him and using the momentum to flip him onto his back. They struggled for dominance, nipping teeth, tangled tongue, hands wrapped in hair, legs curling about legs and rolling the other to their back and trying to fit themselves between the other’s legs. 

Fingon laughed, loving every minute of it, every inch of skin sliding against skin, the teasing growls Maedhros let out and his own teeth snapping back. Maedhros’ eyes lit with fire, burning with passion. Eventually Fingon allowed Maedhros to spread his legs open and settled between them. This time.

Having won their game, Maedhros drew back, catching his eyes. Fingon lost himself inside silver more brilliant than all the stars of heaven. Slowly, Maedhros’ hands traveled up his sides, eyes not unlocking with his, over his shoulders and down his arms. His hands came to circle Fingon’s wrists and lift them in a motion both sensual and powerful over Fingon’s head, stealing Fingon’s breath and any resistance with it.

Maedhros pinned him to the bed, their chests reaching out to touch with each indrawn breath, the swells of their ribcages kissing, their hearts ridding just underneath as if their hearts could not bear to be those last few inches apart.

“Fingon.” Just his name, dropped from lips that caressed it like it was the light of the world, precious beyond measure. Fingon’s chest filled with the tender impulse to cup Maedhros’ face, hold it close like it was the most delicate thing he’d ever laid his hands on.

He smiled. “Kiss me.” His lips sung for the touch of Maedhros.’ Maedhros obliged. 

Inside Maedhros’ mouth, he was brought to dizzying heights, the passion of stars singing through his veins. Maedhros’ tongue sliding against his was the stuff of romance, the making of gods. Inside Maedhros’ mouth he blazed, fire consuming every inch of him down to his toes until he was unmade and reborn in the heat of Maedhros’ skin again his. 

He knew, with the certainty that the world should not exist without Maedhros in it, that what Maedhros and he became to each other in this moment reached deeper than any bond imposed by society’s measurement. This soul kissing his was the one he bound himself to in all the ways that mattered. They would spend their lives together, living in each other’s arms, sleeping forehead-pressed-to-forehead, loving the other’s perfections and flaws until they woke up one day and couldn’t find the places one ended and the other began, so tightly had they wrapped themselves around each other, like a vine that had grown up from root beside another to crisscross and tangle until they grew as one flesh.

*

His fingers traced over the shape of Maedhros’ muscles, dipping into the hollows his vertebra made down his back. Maedhros had fallen into a deep sleep after their love making. 

Fingon had dozed for a time, but he’d taken the sharp-edge off his battle-exhausted already. He was more than content watching Maedhros’ sleep. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to Maedhros’ shoulder blade, the line of his freckled shoulder, the bone at its tip. Maedhros’ skin under his lips brought music to his lips. He nuzzled his nose into Maedhros’ hair.

The only warning he had before the door flung open was the snap of boots against the outside corridor’s floor, but many had hustled passed in the last hours. The door opened to emit a whirlwind. His uncle usually reminded him more strongly of a firestorm, or an encroaching bank of a rolling thunderstorm, but the tone of Fëanor’s voice and the impatient (Fëanor was always impatient to be on to the next thing) but not harsh press of his footsteps told Fingon Fëanor was not in an irritated, or worse, black mood –for the moment.

“Maedhros, I need you to organize—” Fëanor had started talking in that loud but compelling way of his before the door fully opened. Fëanor pulled up short, eyes flying over Maedhros’ bare shoulders and Fingon’s arms wrapped around Fëanor’s sleeping son.

A moment of silence pulled taught and twanging between them. Fingon didn’t drop his eyes; he kept them locked stubbornly with Fëanor’s. He would not be chased away. Fëanor could rage, Fëanor could threaten, Fëanor could even employ his status as Fingon’s king, but Fingon would find a way to Maedhros’ side. He would have torn death apart to get to Maedhros; Fëanor would not stop him. Nothing would.

Fëanor left the doorway to stride to the bed, eyes not leaving Fingon’s. Fingon’s eyes narrowed, chin lifting as his head had to tilt back with Fëanor looming over them like that. Fëanor lowered himself into the bed, sitting on its edge beside Maedhros’ hip. Fingon had not thought Fëanor would surrender the implied power of height.

Fëanor had still not spoken, and Fingon could admit his pulse beat a little faster as the silence stretched on and on and still Fëanor did not explode in rage as Fingon had expected him to. 

Fëanor’s hands came out to curl over the back of Maedhros’ skull, stroking down over the river of tangled hair. “You care for my son, do you?” Fëanor’s eyes burned into Fingon’s face.

Fingon shifted from his elbow to a seated position, needing the sturdier stance to hold that gaze with a defiant one back. The blanket slid to his waist, and his hair swung down to tumbled against his bare chest. Fëanor’s eyes followed the fall of his hair, before sweeping back up to examine the rest of the ocean of curls and waves with an expression Fingon couldn’t read. “You look very like your father with your hair down.”

Fingon frowned. His father never wore his hair down, but always arranged in neat braids. Fingon assumed this comment was a negative one. Fëanor couldn’t stand his half-brother after all, everyone knew that. “I would think I look less like him now.” He almost said ‘in bed with your son’ but bit back the words that would have only lodged like thorns under Fëanor’s tongue.

Fëanor’s eyes fell back to Maedhros’ sleeping form. “He used to wear it down when he was younger.”

Oh. “Well I am not my father.”

Fëanor’s lip lifted in something not quite a sneer. “No, you are not. You are a boy who has broken my son’s heart and sent it dropping into empty space like trash for too many years to count.”

Fingon sucked in a breath, hating how deep and true the words struck. He would not buckle though. He was no blind fool any longer. Now he had Maedhros he would never let him go. “I love him, and he loves me despite how long it took me to open my eyes. And I think I have already demonstrated that I would die and kill for him.”

Fëanor’s gaze rose to his again, not pressing so hot Fingon’s shoulders had to fight not to hunch into themselves this time. Fëanor gave him a slow nod that had Fingon floundering. Had he just earned Fëanor’s approval? Unimaginable. But Fëanor confirmed the impossible. “You are welcome on my ships. You may visit my son whenever he wishes to have you.”

Fingon couldn’t take this acceptance at face-value. There must be something else at work here. “After all these years of enduring your steadfast dislike, you expect me to believe, just like that, you would approve of Maedhros having a relationship with a son of Fingolfin? It is a wonder you haven’t tried to threatened me away, convinced I am ‘stealing’ your son from you.”

Fingon should have stopped while Fëanor was content with the preface of acceptance. Fëanor’s eyes flashed up, lips pulling back to bare his teeth, hands fisting with possession in Maedhros’ hair. “You will _never_ have more of my son’s heart than I.”

Fingon couldn’t just let it go, no, he had to rise to the challenge. “What makes you think I don’t already do?”

Fëanor’s breaths came out in hissing pants, and those eyes, it wasn’t only the fire of rage Fingon had know to kindle easily in Fëanor for years. It was the other light, the one he’d witnessed in the Great Square of Tirion when Fëanor drew his sword and swore an unbreakable Oath. It was the one he’d seen as Fëanor cut through the Teleri, leading his people in a battle against their own kind.

Fëanor’s arms curled around Maedhros, like a wolf over its kill, snarling at any who came too close to what was his. “There is _nothing_ you can give him that he does not already have a hundred times better from his true family. He needs _nothing_ from you.”

It was such a ridiculous, irrational argument, it left Fingon speechless for a moment. There was one rather obvious thing a lover could give their beloved that a brother or father could not. For the flash of a moment Fingon wondered if the unprecedented intimacy of body and spirit all the sons of Fëanor shared with their brothers and father was more, something less innocent than the bonds of familial love and loyalty they’d build with the sturdiness of mountains between them. But the thought departed with the next breath, if on no other evidence than that Maedhros had not lain with any other before him (the shock of that revelation, the thrill –and guilt, for how very many other hands had been on Fingon’s skin before Maedhros’—still had the power to leave Fingon reeling).

Fëanor curled his body around Maedhros’ as if to shield him from Fingon’s unworthy eyes. He brushed the hair back from Maedhros’ face, fingers tracing the shape of his son’s ear. Maedhros stirred under the touch and Fëanor curled even closer to press his lips to Maedhros’ cheek. 

Maedhros smiled like a cat, lazy with sleep. “Mmmm, Fingon,” he mumbled something, still caught in dreams. “…inside you.” 

Maedhros’ face turned to chase the mouth kissing him, and Fëanor’s lips did not pull away before his son’s searching one’s caught his. Fingon gasped.

Fëanor’s lips rested with the touch of hesitancy on his son’s for a moment –inside that swirl of madness raging through him with the destruction of a scorpion sealed up inside his skull, a part of Fëanor must know this was a line even his scant barriers had never crossed before—but the moment buckled. One of Fëanor’s hands dug into his son’s hair, pulling Maehdros’ head back in a controlling grip. His other hand half-encircled Maehdros’ neck that arched up into the touch. Fëanor’s thumb skimmed the exposed line of Maedhros’ throat as his tongue opened Maedhros’ mouth to him. 

Maedhros’ mouth parted wiling before him, arms lifting to wind around his father’s neck as his eyes, the silver of his father’s, blinked the fog of sleep away. Fingon, caught in shock, didn’t move to shove Fëanor off, before Maedhros’ brows crinkled as he pulled back from the kiss with more gentleness than Fëanor deserved.

“Father.” Maedhros’ hands came down to linger on Fëanor’s cheekbones, the sides of the mouth he’d kissed. 

Fëanor did not try to lung in and steal another kiss. His hands petted Maedhros’ back, his hair, his neck, his naked shoulders. “My son.” Fëanor’s eyes burned like stars racing for their moment of implosion. That unnatural fire burned away whatever had been left of the pure fire Fëanor had been born with, eroding it like the wind defeated the mountaintop, given enough time.

“I am right here, Father, right here.” Maedhros’ eyes held gentle love as they looked up into Fëanor’s, and such a deep sorrow beneath it hurt to look into. Maedhros knew; he saw into Fëanor’s eyes as Fingon had. “I love you, Father, and will never leave you. There is nothing, no way, to bind me more tightly to you. We already love you so much, Father, we love you so much. Not one of your sons will ever leave you.”

Fëanor’s breaths shook unsteadily in the quiet of the moment, eyes swinging between Maedhros,’ soaking everything Maedhros was up. “You will not leave me.”

“Never, Father, never.”

Fëanor’s hand took the curve of his son’s jaw in its fingers, the oppressive fire of madness banking with each word. “My little fox.”

Maedhros’ mouth trembled as his hands came up to touch the back of his father’s. “Yes, Father, it is me.”

Fëanor’s fingers stroked down Maedhros’ cheek, brows pulling down as if with pain. “I am sorry.”

Maedhros gave his father a beautiful smile. “I know.” The smile sobered as his gaze searched his father’s. “Just promise me, Father, no matter what fears prey upon you, you will not do this to one of the others. Especially not Curufin. He would not understand.”

Fëanor’s eyes squeezed shut, taking in a deep breath through his nose. He opened his eyes again with the indrawn breath, and bent to brush a kiss against Maedhros’ brow. “I swear it, dearheart.” 

Fëanor lifted off his son, rising to a seated position.

Fingon’s fingers came out to touch the tip of Maedhros’ shoulder. Maedhros’ head whipped around, startled to find another in the bed. His eyes widened as they landed on Fingon’s, and then, like the slow mingling of the Two Trees coming into singing perfection, his mouth pulled into a smile. “Fingon.”

Pure happiness rode in the light of that smile, in the crinkles of those eyes. He looked again as Fingon remembered him from his youth, when Maehdros was the elder cousin he adored and followed around and was always laughing and flashing that smile of his around, stealing the breaths from everyone’s lungs with a single toss of those copper curls. That was before the air in Tirion turned sour and thick in Fingon’s mouth, before everyone had to walk on eggshells.

Fëanor touched Maedhros’ blooming cheek with a finger, and smiled down at his son with a smile Fingon knew well, the uncomplicated one of a father upon his son. “You are happy.”

“Yes, Father. I am so, so happy.”

“Then that is all that matters.” Fëanor stood from the bed with one last brush of his hand through Maedhros’ hair, and turned his eyes back on Fingon. 

Once upon a time, when Fingon was still some years short of his majority, his uncle had not looked upon him with coolness. Fingon had always supposed he’d received those approving looks because he had been too young yet to warrant Fëanor’s focused dislike as a son of Fingolfin. He was beginning to think Fëanor had disliked him so steadfastly not because of anything to do with his father, but because of Maedhros. Because Fingon had broken Maedhros’ heart over and over again.

The look Fëanor held him under now was not one of softness, but it was the first one Fingon received without that light of dislike ever hovering in the back of Fëanor’s eyes (eyes so painfully similar to Maedhros’ own). 

Fëanor turned from the bed. “You may take this message to your father: my ships have room for what wounded he would send. If he has the common sense to take up my offer, have him pass along a message and my people will come to escort your wounded onboard. Your healers may accompany them, but no one else.” Fëanor shut the door behind him without awaiting a reply.

Maedhros arched like a cat, ribs pressing against his skin, the muscles of his chest and belly impossible to look away from. He slid Fingon a sly smile, “I think my father is starting to like you.” 

Fingon forced a smile back, “In some dream world of yours.”

“Stranger things have happened.” 

“Don’t get my hopes up,” Fingon struggled for humor, but he couldn’t do this. He couldn’t pretend nothing had happened. “Maedhros, your father, what he did to you—”

Maedhros curved his spine and sat up on the bed. He did not turn to face Fingon. Silence descended, hanging thick with words unsaid and the weight of a kiss. 

Maedhros did not have to speak to make his desires known. Ever he danced away from any line of conversation pulling too close to his father or brothers. Amusing stories about his brothers, little annoyances, these he would speak of, but never his brothers’ hearts. If he had known Fingon was in the bed with him, he would not have revealed so much when Fëanor had been…lost.

Fingon would not let unspoken words linger between them. “When he kissed—”

Maedhros made a cutting gesture with his hand, but his face did not turn back; it kept Fingon in profile. Fingon allowed himself to be silenced. For the moment. 

Maedhros gathered his loose hair back, and it tumbled down his shoulder blades to pool beside his hips on the bed. The line of his cheekbone and jaw cut across the skin of his face, sharp and stunning. Fingon’s fingers ached to trace those lines, but Maedhros’ shoulder facing him was a door shut.

“This is not something I will discuss with you.” Maedhros’ voice carried the termination of a kill. 

But Fingon was no deer to lie down before the hunter. He would not be shut out. “Well, it seems like something you ought to discuss with your lover to me.” 

Now Maedhros did turn to meet his eyes, but the arch of his brow, the title of his mouth, all spoke of dismissal. “You do not understand.” No plea nestled in those words, only that haughtiness of drawl Maedhros adopted when his temper had been stirred. How many lords had Fingon heard Maedhros talk down to? That voice, that look turned on him, sliced him every time. 

His temper flared back. He leaned closer, hand pressing down into the mattress so he could snap his words into a face as aloof as marble. “You are right. I don’t understand how your own father could kiss you and you not even care—” No. He bit back the rest of the lashing words before they could hit the air. He would not pick up anger.

Maedhros face shuttered against him. “I do not care. Not in the way you expect –want—me to.”

Maedhros leaned back, spine straightening, pulling distance between them. Something cold and brittle dwelt in his eyes, like the fragile formation of dusted snow upon window glass. “My father could kiss me as often as he liked. He could do _anything_ to my body, and I would rejoice in it if in my giving he came back to us. If I could bring him back by lying under him, I would do it in a heartbeat.” Maehdros’ head titled up, high with pride.

Fingon searched Maedhros’ face for a long moment. “You are…” Maedhros stiffened. “So much more than Fëanor deserves.”

Maedhros’ lashes swooped down. “No, he does.” He turned his face away, a swath of his lovely hair slipping loose of its nest on his shoulders to slide over his bare chest and steal his profile from Fingon. “You never knew him, Fingon. You never knew him as he once was.”

Maedhros looked back, a corner of his face framed in copper, individual strands fluttering against his cheekbone and lips. He held Fingon’s eyes, and challenged him with a question Fingon would have preferred never been asked: “If it was your father, if you had to watch Fingolfin succumb to madness, if you had to look into your father’s eyes when nothing but agony and madness stared back, would you not do just the same? Tell me, Fingon, if all it took to heal your father was your father’s mouth on yours, your father’s cock within you, would you not give this price, would you not spread your legs even wider to accept every inch of him, and gladly?” 

Fingon flushed at the images Maedhros’ words conjured, but he did not shy from the truth, “You know I would.” 

“Then we understand each other at last.” 

Fingon stretched out his hand, touching the seam of Maedhros’ neck, brushing back the fine copper strands from that white column. “But after I may wish I had my lover’s arms to fold into and know that I was loved by him and always would be, no matter what had passed.” 

Maedhros let out a long, tightly control breath, holding it steady when it wanted to whoosh out shaky and desperate. He shifted, drawing close and slipping his arms around Fingon to settle them both back down on the bed. Fingon sighed into his lover’s embrace. 

“I am well, my dear.” Maybe he was now, but Fingon should have assured Maedhros of his love and acceptance before anything else. His heart tightened. Would he make as poor a husband as he had made a father and son? 

“I love you,” at the least he had courage to speak his heart, “forgive me for casting blame—” 

“Shh,” Maehdros kissed his ear. His voice came soft, like a thousand secret dreams. “One day we will know each other so well a single look will say everything, and the idea of walking through life without each other by our side will be but the memories of youth we look back on and wonder at, as if we looked upon two strangers wearing our skin in an alien world. We will laugh to see them walking apart; for such an idea will have been so utterly banished from our minds it will seem nonsensical to even ponder such an existence.” 

Fingon pulled up to his elbow, hair running down to cage them in folds of night as he hovered over Maedhros’ face. “I wish I could speak the words of my heart as you do.” His fingers came up to travel that perfect line of cheekbone, taking the curve of Maedhros’ eye, learning the path to his beloved’s ear, and then the shell of it. “I would have you know…” He licked his lips, eyes sliding to his beloved’s eyes.

“You have already told me. Your eyes, your hands, your body, they have spoken a thousand sweet promises to me. I have heard you say: we are eternity.”

Fingon’s eyes slipped closed. “Yes. Yes, my mouth would speak those words.”

Maehdros’ hands came up to burry themselves in Fingon’s hair, thumbs framing his jaw. “Nothing you speak in anger will ever drive me away, for I know your heart.”

Fingon’s lashes fluttered open as a person would let them slip shut when savoring a delicacy on their tongue. Maedhros’ words were sweeter than any sugar-spun confection. He found Maedhros wearing a smile, on his mouth, in his eyes, in the beat of his heart pressed naked and warm against Fingon’s heart where they lay chest-to-chest on the bed. Fingon closed the distance between their mouths, needing to taste that smile on his tongue. It tasted like wholeness.


	19. Chapter 17

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 17

Maglor tossed the torch, watching it arch high in the starlit sky to land on the deck of a Swan Ship. Hundreds of burning torches came at its heels as the followers of Fëanor emulated Fëanor’s lead. The sight of the flaming ships had its own sort of twisted beauty. 

Maedhros used to tease him on his fanciful nature, but Maedhros’ smile would cut his mouth now, devoid of humor in the backlight of burning ships. Maedhros saw their actions as a betrayal, and not as Father said: a safe-guard against back-stabbing traitors and a burning away of their old life in chains.

The orange light cast ominous shadows on their faces and the strange, silver-lit lands of their new home. When Maglor looked into his father’s eyes he did not see his father staring back. He saw madness. He followed his father regardless.

What were they doing? Had they completely lost their minds? He’d asked himself these questions not a few times since he felt what it was to slip a sword through an Elf’s belly. The horror came after. The need to protect, to save his family, had held it back, but it was there waiting for him, for all of them, when the danger passed. 

But he’d made his choice, and it was his family. The guilt and doubts were unavoidable, but they were conquerable. He turned his back on the crackling ships, the ocean that had vengefully eaten so many of their people, and what had once been his home. If this was freedom, its price was far too steep, and its wings felt like chains binding him more cruelly than any fair Valinorion cage. But he’d not come here for freedom; he’d come out of love.

His eyes sank into the deep shadows of this new world. Darkness lurked here. It crawled slimy and cold over his skin. He lifted his chin and met it, undaunted. His family surrounded him; what could defeat them when they stood shoulder-to-shoulder? 

Maglor, unlike Maedhros, had not asked Fëanor to send the ships back for those they’d abandoned. Especially not for Irimë. He did he want her standing by his side. 

Growing up, his family had spent years in the wilds of Valinor on Fëanor’s quest to understand the mysteries of the world. Fëanor wanted to touch the essence of Arda, push his fingers into it, dissect it. He wanted to hear the heartbeat of the planet’s blood and question its rhythm and the pause between every breath.

When Father brought them back to Tirion for the twins’ birth, Maglor first saw Irimë. He’d spent weeks wandering Tirion, encountering dozens of women who lowered their lashes and giggled behind their hands when Maedhros or he drew near, which made the bold flame of Irimë stand out all the brighter.

He had been very young, not even of age. He’d been untouched, and anxious to leap the boundaries of adulthood. On his own, he never would have approached her, or even thought to do so, but she had been the pursuer from the beginning and he had not rebuffed her advances.

Irimë Finwëion had been something he shouldn’t put his hands on. She was forbidden, and he hadn’t been able to resist.

That was then, when he’d still been an impressionable youth straddling the line into adulthood. This was now, after the glass cradling her had shattered and the woman behind had proven nothing but a pretty illusion.

A part of him had thought itself in love with her, before all her faults had been laid bare. And the flaws had only grown as the years passed, leaving less and less worth loving. 

The ships burned, and he felt peace. He stood where he was meant to be: at his brothers and his father’s side. Let Fingolfin’s people go home, freed from this Curse he could already feel wrapping bands around them. It was safer there, in that gilded cage. 

When their vengeance had been sated, Morgoth felled and the Silmarils reclaimed, maybe they would seek the West again. Maglor was not optimistic enough to think they would return without scars and friend-sized holes in their ranks, but he did look forward to the day they would be victorious. Despite the Doom of Mandos and the blood on their hands, he had not stopped believing in the best outcome. All was not yet dark, and he had faith that if anyone could find a way to take them home again it would be Father. 

*

Finarfin slumped more than sat in the throne. His hands ran like wilted feathers over the beautifully carved armrests. There was no crown upon his head. Fëanor had taken the crown into Exile with him. Its radiant golden light was now as lost as the people who followed the head who wore it. It mattered not. He doubted he could have stomached wearing it.

Eärwen’s absence was a wound in his right side. She had refused to leave Valinor from the first, and now…with the Noldor’s hands stained with the blood of her people, Finarfin did not expect to feel the warmth of her body in the bed beside him ever again.

The halls once teaming with life now lay submerged in silence. A dead, abandoned city, this was what he ruled over. The greatest flames of their people had thrown themselves into a quest with only vengeance and death at its end. 

He walked through halls flushed with ghosts, footsteps leaden as if he dragged the bodies of those he’d lost behind him. Children. Grandchildren. Brothers. Father. Nephews. Nieces. All gone. Even the echo of their names, a wound in his chest. 

His eyes turned East, and not for the first time since he’d abandoned the Noldor to the Doom of Mandos did he wondered what could have been if he had not turned back. He had been too sickened to take another step, only his children’s determination to press on pulling his feet on after Alqualondë. 

But they were lost to him now. If he had only had more strength, if only the memories of Alqualondë had not haunted him every waking moment since he’d come upon the slaughter of his adopted people by the people he had been born to. Was anything worth abandoning his children and brothers to this terrible fate? He was not so naïve to think he would not be haunted by regrets and what could have beens for the rest of his days.

*

The Valar reeled Fëanor’s soul in with a lasso that burned ice-cold, anticipating his disoriented in those first moments of death. They pounced in that one moment of weakness. He’d been nothing but emotions –love, rage, loss, hate, sorrow, regret—with madness clinging to everything like a poisonous vine. 

Death had a way of stripping the soul. It worked at him, ripping and tearing and sawing the layers of madness away. When he awoke from that state of world too-sharp, too-muddled, himself too-numb, too-grief-stricken to think through the pain, he found himself in hell. 

Into the prisons of Mandos they cast him and bound him with chains forged with the power of the Valar. So greatly did they fear him, they sealed him in the very chains that had once held Morgoth. They made his neighbors in torment ruined souls. Ones who had once been Elves before Morgoth’s black hands touched them. These ruined souls drew close, huddling around the flame of his spirit dropped into their mists like a downed star. Fëanor felt their closeness like the coldness of an ice-bath. 

He hung, bound, alone but for the icy-breath of twisted _fëar_ in the darkness. He did not know how long he hung there. Long enough his mind preyed on him, reliving every mistake, tormented by the thought of his sons abandoned and left at the mercy of the Oath _he_ had pressed like a coal against their lips. What had he done, what had he done, what had he _done_?

The Doomsman came to him where he hung eating himself alive in their chains. Grey shrouded Námo’s looming figure, face hidden. His voice was the merciless cut of _justice_ , devoid of compassion or any understanding of the hearts of the Children. He weighed only action. 

His voice filled every corner of the cell, but bore no inflection: “Here begins the judgment of Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion. Let the scales be made ready.”

Grey light swirled and eddied in the air, taking the shape of a pair of silver scales ten times the size of the ones used at markets or in the king’s treasury. Both measuring hands were empty and balanced. Námo glided behind them. The grey shroud that veiled him from head to toe rippled like water as he moved. 

“Let the crimes of Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion be listed.” He raised an arm, holding it high over the scale’s cupped and empty hands. 

“Causing physical pain by non-fatally injuring one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 32 accounts.” A grey droplet, like a tear, pooled at the top of one finger and dropped onto the scale. Its balanced tipped. Thirty-one more drops were added to the scale. 

“Slaying one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 23 accounts. 

Maiming of limb of one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 7 accounts.

Grief-slaying one of Ilúvatar’s Children who succumbed to despair: 6 accounts.

Widowing one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 16 accounts.

Orphaning one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 2 accounts.” The scale’s hand contained a lake of droplets now, and the hand had stopped sinking with each new drop many tears earlier, having already reached a full-imbalance.

Námo paused and examined the scales. “The weight of crimes is heavy indeed. Yet I judge you as more than a man. You are a king, and the crimes of those who followed you lay at your feet. Let the listing of the crimes of Fëanor, King of the Noldor, begin. Let justice be done for the deeds at Alqualondë. I judge the crimes committed that day –against Teleri and Noldor—lay solely at the feet of Fëanor, King of the Noldor, who led his people into Doom:

Causing physical pain by non-fatally injuring of one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 4, 347 accounts.

Slaying one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 1, 539 accounts. 

Maiming of limb of one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 578 accounts.

The grief-slaying of one of Ilúvatar’s Children who succumbed to despair: 187 accounts.

Widowing one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 3,167 accounts.

Orphaning one of Ilúvatar’s Children: 47 accounts.” The lake in the scale’s hand defied the rules of gravity, and swelled ever higher without over-spilling the hand’s cup, though the water level had long since passed the brink.

“The crimes of Fëanor and Fëanor King of the Noldor have been accounted. Let judgment be passed, and the scales balanced.” Námo lifted his arm over the empty hand of the scales. “For your crimes I pass this judgment: confinement in the Halls of the Dead, denied re-birth, until the Remaking of the World.”

A droplet formed on the tip of his finger. It swelled, gathering size, until at last it carried the weight of Ages imprisoned. It fell, and landed with a slash. The scales creaked, click, click, and stopped. The weight of his crimes could not be balanced by imprisonment unto World’s Ending. Not by the measure of the Valar’s scales.

“The scales are unbalanced. The punishment does not fit the crime.” Námo folded his hands before him. “Further punishment will be merited out until the scales are balanced. The scales must be balanced.” 

Námo turned and glided out, leaving the unbalanced scales where they stood –so that Fëanor would not forget, for even a moment, the weight of his crimes. The heavy prison door shut behind Námo with the finality of eternity. 

The darkness pressed on him like the hand of a giant, seeking to grind his bones into dust. The only light in his cell came from his own spirit and the cold, silver glint of the scales. They were the only thing left in the darkness. Or so Námo would like him to believe, until they eclipsed all else in his mind and he broke. But no Vala’s tricks would break him. He could not afford to be broken. He had to get out of here. His sons needed him. He had to get _out_. They needed their father (who had done this to them). They needed—

Vairë, wife of Námo, came to him first, wrapped in fabric woven like a tapestry, a heavily embroidered veil over her face. She came with light, a lamp of yellow the twisted _fëar_ crowed close to, like chilled hands rubbed over a fire. She set up her loom there, in the line of his sight so he did not miss a thread of the weaving, and began. 

She spoke no word, she lashed out with no whip of Power; she did not have to. The agony she ripped into his soul tore deeper than any physical pain. And there was no release, no way to fight back, claw his way out of this cell and to his son’s side. _Oh, Maedhros, Maedhros! Not my son, not my little fox, please, please!_ He was utterly powerless, and could do nothing but watch and weep and rage as the horror of his son’s torture was woven into a tapestry dripping with agony.

Everything they did to him after was nothing, _nothing_ , to the way his heart ripped out of his chest and stuffed itself down his throat to suffocate him with _what he had done_. (I am so sorry, I am so _sorry_ , just don’t hurt him anymore, take me, take me instead!)

Vairë wove, and his anguish was measured in grey droplets drip, drip, dripping onto the scales. But they did not balance.

Grey-cloaked Maiar came to him with the blood of the Foam-riders in their eyes, and the dying’s screams in their voices. They gave him wounds that did not bleed, and dug holes in his mind. There were a million fire-ants crawling over his skin, a million points of blinding light burning his eyes, a million knives cutting into him, and yet there was none of these things for he was nothing but a houseless spirit. He had no limbs to pull, no back to arch in agony, no hands to claw at the ones tormenting him, and he did these things as surely as he felt every drop of their punishment as real as if he still had a body to break.

But he did not break. He did not relinquish even a scrap of himself into the torturer’s pliers. They deluded themselves if they thought he would ever play puppet to their mastery. Pain could not break him when his heart had already been ripped out and he had died a thousand deaths in the putrid sea of his own failure he choked on like sewage as he watched his sons pay the price for his weakness.

Grey droplets formed to the sounds of his screams. They drip, drip, dripped onto the scales. They did not balance.

He wrapped the only weapon he had left around him: his rage like an incandescent sun-blast. His fury rolled off him in waves, and the marred souls gulped up its heat-blast. The Valar thought to have him crawling to their whims, but even if it took a hundred years he would take back his freedom, rip it from their grasp and use his broken chains to bind those who sought to bind him. Even if it took a thousand years, he would fight his way back to his sons. 

And so it went on, torture unending, the drip, drip, drop of his suffering. The scales did not balance.

The scales did not balance.

The scales did not balance.

The scales did not balance.

NO! He would not break for them. Not for the cruel hands that had woven Maedhros’ torment and moved not a fingernail to save his son. (Have you no pity? No scrap of compassion in your hearts? And the Doomsman’s voice answered like the clang, clang, clang of a bell tolling the hour of judgment: Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentations shall pass over the mountains. He chose his fate.)

His son, his little fox, was being broken in the dark, crying out for his father to _save him_ , and Fëanor could do _nothing_. Nothing but refuse to let his jailers break him. He couldn’t let them break his back and stick needles through his wrists and sew their puppeteer’s strings into his skin. He had to shatter these chains and blast through the walls of this prison, and smite Morgoth with the hammer blow of how- _dare_ -you-touch- _my-son_!

Time unspooled. Even hanging bound in darkness with no means of measuring its passing, he sensed he had languished in torment here while his sons were out there, needing him, for a span of time that seemed an eternity. Had it been months now? Years, since his death? It could not be centuries. It _could not_. He could not…he had failed them. He had led his sons to their doom. He had killed them, oh, oh, this pain, no, _no_! He had to get out!

His cell door groaned open. Light, blessed light, washed over him. He gulped it down and fortified himself for the coming torture that was nothing, _nothing_ , to the anguish in his heart. 

Drip, drip, drop. One last click, one last scream, and…the scales balanced. 

The grey-cloaked Maiar slinked from the room like hyenas before the coming of the lion. Námo had returned. He stood motionless and heartless over Fëanor where he grasped at the pieces of himself they had torn away, snatching them back before they disintegrated in the darkness, their light blown out like a candle’s flame. He would not break. He _would not_.

“The scales are balanced. The punishment judged justice. Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion will be removed from the Judgment Seat and taken to a Hall of the Dead. There you will remain until the Breaking of the World with other souls who have balanced their scales. So I, Námo, Lord of the Dead, have judged.”

It was…over? But no, even if this eternity upon eternity of torment had ended, it would never be over until he had his sons back, until he saved them from what he had done (he could never save them. It was far, far too late for that).

Námo glided to him, and reached out a hand, pale and skeletal-thin. It touched one of the chains wrapped around him with the continuous, unending pain of being trapped under the surface of an arctic lake. It was a cold so deep it burned. Námo’s fingers brushed against his naked spirit, and Fëanor recoiled. It was like having the hands of a corpse running over his skin, digging inside him, deeper than any violation of the _hröa_ , for this was his _soul_.

Námo pronounced as he ran his fingers over the chains, uncaring or unseeing of the way his touch sank into Fëanor like defilement, “Your sons will enter my halls very soon. It will not be long now before they sit where you have sat in the Judgment Seat. Perhaps the scales will judge their crimes as balanced by all the Ages of the world in my halls, but I think not. Especially not your eldest. Maedhros Fëanorion will have greater crimes than even you to bear the punishment of, for he inherited your Oath and led your House to its end. And the House of Fëanor must pay its debts.”

No. No please. Yet he had known, in the deepest recesses of his heart, that it was only a matter of time before death found them. He had known it the moment the land fell away and the walls of Morgoth’s stronghold rocketed out of the earth with the might of mountains and the sky boiled black and noxious. Grief wrapped itself around his ankles in bonds of lead, dragging him down like a swimmer fettered with irons and fighting against the power of nature.

The thought of his sons suffering and abandoned all these years, paying the price for his weakness, only to be lassoed by the chains of death and reeled into this torture chamber as he had been, was unbearable. The Valar had no right to sit in judgment of them and deal out punishment in a sick distortion of justice, but they would regardless of right. He was helpless to save his sons from death, and had no power to stop the drops from falling onto the scales, but maybe, maybe he could save his sons some small measure of the anguish he had poured down their throats, and swallow it down his own (take me, take me instead). 

/Give their punishment to me. Let their judgment fall on my scales./

Námo paused. He seemed to study Fëanor through the grey, heavy veil discontenting him from the world. He spoke, voice ordered and emotionless as the reading out of law: “You would bear their crimes upon your own scales?”

/Yes./

“You ask for the crimes of all who followed the House of Fëanor into Doom, or only that of your sons?”

/All. Give them all to me. Let me pay the price./

“If you do this, your scale will not be balanced for Three Ages of the World. Your punishment will match Melkor’s, whose crimes were incalculable in their evil.”

/So be it./ If he could spare them a moment of this torture, Three Ages of suffering it himself, alone in this darkness, would be no more than he deserved (He had done this. He had abandoned them to hell. Oh Maedhros. I am so _sorry_.)

The droplets of crimes began to fall. Drip, drip, drop. The scales click, click, clicked. The hand of his crimes sinking lower, lower, the scales unbalanced.

The scales would not be balanced for Three Ages of the World.

He gathered the faces of his dear ones to his heart. For Maedhros, for Maglor, for Celegorm, for Caranthir, for Curufin, for Amrod and Amras, for Celebrimbor, he would endure. He would not break. At least, he thought as the hyenas slinked back in, he had saved them from _something_.


	20. The Son of Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: chapter contains rape.

Intermission: The Son of Fire

Maedhros’ quill paused as the door eased open. Footsteps attempting to fall with muffled grace but unable to master what only Elven-feet could, approached. He set the quill down without hurry, and folded the parchment he’d covered with his deepest fears, joys, and loathings. Once, and then again, he folded it as the footsteps came to stand directly behind him.

He arranged the pages end-up on the desk into a make-shift lantern, and lit a match from the candle’s flame. He took his time about setting the parchment on fire, feeding the match’s flame to just the top edge. 

He poured himself into the pages multiple times in a day, it kept what he deposited in ink from preying upon him (much). It did not matter if these thoughts were taken from him and violated as his mind was routinely violated. Morgoth had already seen them all –or all but the joyful and tender memories, those he’d scorned. If he bled himself out with ink, empting all this burning inside him, then when Morgoth raked his eyes through him, Maedhros’ mind would not pull from his control like a horse yanking the reigns from its rider’s grasp. Emotions were a weakness he must keep clipped. 

He was not strong enough yet to keep the Vala from his mind, but one day he would be. Morgoth afforded him much practice after all. Maedhros had learned he could cover his plots of escape up when Morgoth pursued his mind at leisure with the kind of sweet, gentle memories Morgoth discarded as useless.

It was not much, but it was something.

Fingers climbed the outer layer of his hair, fingering it like strings of pearls. Maedhros gathered himself, and turned with a crooked smile that had dashed blushes like freckles across the cheeks of women in Tirion. The she-Orc’s cheeks did not pick up a blush, but her eyes squinted in the way he had learned meant she was pleased.

He propped his elbow on the chair’s rest, chin settling in his cupping palm, as the she-Orc circled him to drop her hip against the desk’s wood. “You have not visited for some days. I was starting to feel neglected.”

Narghaash tilted him a smile, fangs glinting wetly in the candlelight. “Your crafty tongue will not work on me.”

“Oh?” He raised a brow, lips curling in a smirk. “Has it not already? Or was it my pretty face that has you coming back for more?”

Narghaash’s leaned further back into the desk, head lifting to show off the long line of her neck three snug, copper rings adorned. Maedhros had learned that each one denoted rank. To have access to the Dark Lord’s prized prisoner, an Orc had to have climbed very high indeed in their lord’s army. 

The bone piercing the bridge of her nose marked her as barren. Only one in ten Orc females were born with the capacity to bare children, and these breeders were both dotted upon and imprisoned by their race. They were kept almost continuously pregnant, and never allowed to leave the shelter of the Orc’s deepest dens. Maedhros had not determined how these scraps of knowledge gleaned of the Orcish race and their culture would assist in his escape, but knowledge of his enemy was never wasted knowledge.

Narghaash slid him a glance along the curve of her cheekbone, and tailed her fingers through the flames of the burning parchment slowing eating its way to the desktop. “Perhaps you have. Or perhaps I have grown tired of your games, crafty-tongue.”

Maedhros let his elbow drop, and his fingers dangle with lazy elegance over the chair’s armrest as he leaned back. “Ah, but it is you who plays the game, for have I not given you all my cards already?”

Narghaash’s eyes had caught on the line of his hand. They walked themselves up the muscles of his arms and shoulders, pausing to watch how the candlelight netted in his hair. She could never resist touching, even now her fingers caught a lock of his hair to rub its finest between thumb and forefingers. “But it is you who sets the rules, Light-eater.”

He took her idling hand, encircling his fingers around her wrist. The nostrils of her broad nose flared at the touch, eyes hooding as they met his. “I have asked but one thing of you before I grant your desire. If there are rules I have set, it is only this one.”

Her mouth flattened. “You know I cannot give it to you!” Her body shifted, restless. 

He rubbed his thumb over the skin of her inner wrist, soothing her with a touch. “No one has to know it was you, Narghaash.”

“ _He_ will know. And I will know I have betrayed my lordship’s will. I cannot do this thing.”

“There are others who come to visit me. No one need ever know it was you who left the door unlocked.”

Narghaash’s teeth bared, but it was only frustration as she did not pull from his touch. “And what of the sword you would have me smuggle you? Hmm? What of Angband’s entrances you wish me to sketch, and door-guards to number? You say it is but one thing you ask of me, but it is many! I have betrayed the times and numbers of your guards’ changing, and your room’s location in the Hall of the Serpent’s Breath, I will give you no more!”

“Shh,” Maedhros forced himself to carry this into the next step. There were others who came to him, some only out of orders, others unable to resist after they’d glimpsed him led through the halls, but none who stood as fair a change of using to his advantage as Narghaash. So he did what he must, and pulled her into his lap.

She sat stiffly for a moment, before leaning against his chest. Her face did not melt to him, but he had not expected it to. She lusted for him, but that lust took a different expression than the women in Tirion’s courts. 

She turned her head to him, the black strands of her high fist of hair brushed across his face. She smelt of blood and iron with something rotten underneath. The corner of her mouth quirked. The single fang long enough to curve down her lower lip was stained yellow from the blood in her diet. “You think to seduce me and bend me to your will?”

He hummed, chest vibrating against her back. He traced a circle on her hipbone. “Is it working?”

She held his eyes as she spread her thighs, inviting. “I have not decided yet.”

The tips of his fingers followed the leather along her outer-thigh. He leaned forward, her body moving with him, to pull a fresh sheet of parchment over the desk. “Show me how to walk out of Angband, and I will give you pleasure unimagined.”

She slapped the parchment away. It fluttered like a falling leaf to the ground as she turned on him with a snarl. “He will kill me! I should tie you to your bed and _make_ you service me!”

He shifted back on the chair, hands falling from her body to dangle off the chair’s rests. “You cannot force what you lust after. If you wanted a cock, you could have one on command, but your desires are a woman’s desires,” his voice purred low, seductive, “yours is a sophisticated lust. No man will satisfy you but one who will lay your body down and taste your poison like it belongs in his veins, only a man who will light wildfires under your skin, and lead you into the darkness with a kiss and the cry he stole from your throat with—”

“Ugh!” She shoved herself off him. “You think me one of your soft bitches that you can bend me to your will with pretty words? I want to fuck you, Light-eater, not this talk of wildfires and kisses.” 

The fingers of Maedhros’ right hand curled into a ball, once, twice, before they draped with apparent nonchalance again. He scooted his hips forward on the chair, and crossed one long leg over the other as she crossed her arms over her chest. He met her gaze with a hooded one of his own. 

He could hold her eyes without the smallest flinch at the yellow where whites should surround the pits of pitch black. Still, he preferred her eyes to the Orcs with eyes burning with a light nothing like that of the Tree’s, but a fanatic’s light for the lord they would cut out their own hearts for if he asked it of them.

“Very well, you _do_ want my cock. Are Orc cocks on the stunted side? Is that an unfortunate side-effect of your master’s tinkering, like your females’ bareness?” He could not wipe his voice free of the condensation entirely. Superiority had been a natural default in Valinor. It helped him nothing at all here.

“Maybe you will discover for yourself as you seem so eager. You can have an Orc-cock now.” Her mouth split in a smile of fangs. “I did not come to stare at your pretty face, Light-eater. His lordship has called for you.”

Maedhros swallowed, cursing himself. He should have burned his pride and revulsion and Fingon— (No. Gone. Do not think of him.) but now it was too late for desperate maneuvers and bartering his body. Morgoth had not called him since the Dark Vala laid out his offer and granted Maedhros time to _make the right choice._

Well. His card house had not folded yet. If he could but delay Morgoth a few weeks longer, he might be able to twist something out of Narghaash despite today’s blunders.

He unfolded himself from the chair, his full height towering over Narghaash. He took one purposeful breath in through his nose. Then he lifted a brow, and gestured with a sweep of a long-fingered hand, “Shall we?”

She did not move her glare from his face for a moment, but then she huffed, arms sliding from their brace against her chest, one hand falling to the knife’s hilt on her hip. “We go before his lordship, into the presence of the might the Arda, how can you…?” She shook her head at him, brushing passed, and marched for the door.

His legs ate the ground behind her, not bothering with an answer to her half-formed question. The answer was he couldn’t. But he knew how to pretend.

At the door, the Orcs standing guard snapped spell-enforced shackles around his wrists, before Narghaash led the way to her waiting lord. The images of snakes immense enough to swallow an elephant slithered across the tiled floor. The wall torches reflected off the polished bronze walls of the hall. The swirling designs etched into them resembled fire’s breath with the torchlight dancing sinister shadows.

They arrived at a pair of massive iron doors after an uncomfortably short walk. Morgoth chose to keep his prized prisoner close. These door-guards were no armored Orcs, but two Balrogs standing sentry. Passing beneath their crossed, massive wings of shadow was like passing into the heat of a volcanic mountain.

They stepped into an outer-hall where the walls shone white like ice from all the crystal, and the floor was an obsidian polished so smooth the light slid over it like black water. Narghaash unshackled him, and gestured wordlessly to the looming door. The face of a snarling wolf punched out of the iron where the doors’ handles mocked him. 

He could hear her swallow in the silence. He put his back to her, set blocks of steel inside his shoulders, erased the names and faces he could not afford to remember in _his_ presence, and went to the door. It ground open, the muscles of his arm feeling its weight.

The first thing he noticed about Morgoth’s chambers was not the black stone table spread with a feast fit for a king, or the dark god lounging in a chair the cousin of a throne, but the window cutting a horizon in the far wall from which the red-glow of Thangorodrim’s steaming mouths spilled. He could not tear his eyes away from his first glimpse of the world outside his prison since his capture. Mountains backed the Thangorodrim, but there in the far southern corner peeked a glimmer of silver bathed grasslands. 

“Appreciating the view?” His eyes snapped back to Morgoth at the drawling voice. A knowing smirk met him from underneath his father’s stolen jewels. “Are these lands as fair as you dreamed—or was that only your father who dreamed?”

Maedhros took a few firm strides into the room, pulling away from his creep by the door. “All of Fëanor’s blood shared his hunger for lands free of the Valar’s dominion.”

“Indeed.” Morgoth settled further back in his chair.

Maedhros’ mouth lifted in something only the mockery of a smile. “What? No offer of a drink? How uncivilized of you.”

Morgoth’s smile revealed a set of fine teeth, too white to sit with such comfort in a mouth that should have stunk with decay. “By all means, seat yourself,” he made a sweeping gesture to the empty seat across the expanse of his feast table. “I had it prepared for you, Prince—ah, forgive me; it is king now, is it not?”

Maedhros flashed a smile that could have snapped the heads off flowers at Morgoth as he strode forward. “Yes. It is.”

“How clumsy of me. You must forgive me. It has been some years now since I dinned with Noldorin royalty. I seem to be forgetting how your kind revere formalities.”

Maedhros settled into the chair, gathering his hair to spill over one shoulder as he made himself comfortable with his weight leaned back on one hip. “It is forgiven.” 

Morgoth’s wine glass paused on its way to his mouth, before he lifted it in a mock toast to him. Maedhros accepted it with an incline of his head. 

He cast a haughty eye over the table’s spread. “Tell me, do Dark Lord’s traditionally dine without servers? In Tirion it is a mark of low class in some circles.”

Morgoth plucked a grape from its vine, and rolled its plump flesh between his fingers as he surveyed Maedhros. “I recall your father had a habit of dinning without attendants.”

“I had no idea you set to model yourself after my father, Morgoth. He would be flattered.”

The grape’s juice spurted out as Morgoth’s blacked fingers squeezed it to death. “Do not call me by that _repulsive_ name.”

Maedhros collected this knowledge like the knife-edged weapon it was: as likely to cut off its wielder’s hand in the wielding as the target’s.

“We would have loved to see his face swell purple as a prune, but loath as we are to admit it, you should not upset him.” It took all of Maedhros’ will to hold his face like bronze and turn only his leaping eyes to the voice. 

Fëanor rounded the back of Maedhros’ chair to rest his hip against the table’s lip. His eyes were the soft glow of starlight’s touch as they gazed upon Maedhros.

/ _Father._ / It was not. But in that moment, alone, fighting against the fear, and still overflowing with grief, it was good enough. 

It had nearly undone him when Fëanor appeared before him as he was dragged into the Hall of Eternal Night in chains to be thrown at Morgoth’s feet. Fëanor there, with him, had been the only thing that kept the dam against despair from breaking. It had hurt to see his father’s face again, but hurt so beautifully.

His father –the Silmarils? The ghost inside Maedhros’ head?—smiled. Even if all this was not real, his father’s smile still had the power to fill him like a skin of rich wine. / _Our son._ / Fëanor reached out, brushing his fingers against Maedhros’ cheek, and though this was a dead man’s touch Maedhros felt it like the kiss of Laurelin’s noontide. / _We have missed you. But we counted it fortunate the more time passed and he did not call you to an accounting. But now the hour is upon you, and you must be careful our son, very careful./_

Morgoth was visibly pulling his control back in hand, and Maedhros had to tear his eyes away from his father to meet his opponent in battle. “How have you found my hospitality? Fit for the Noldor’s king?”

Maedhros canted his head to the side, some of his hair spilling out to flutter in copper waves to the floor where it pooled like still water reflecting the light. “It is rather lacking in strolls under the starlight.”

Morgoth laughed. Maedhros caught his father’s sneer, a look of such _loathing_ upon his face it seemed incomprehensible that Morgoth could not feel it burning him like the scorching heat of a furnace fire.

Morgoth pushed his plate back, and laced his hands over his stomach. “If that is your only complaint, then count yourself the most privileged prisoner ever to come under my care.”

Maedhros shifted forward to snag the wine pitcher and pour himself a glass. It brought his hand close enough to brush up against his father’s, and Fëanor followed his desire, prolonging the touch when he fit his hand around the outside of Maedhros.’ It was not real, but with his father’s hand around his, he felt less alone. He was not forsaken. 

His father gave him the strength to meet Morgoth’s eyes with a confidence he should not have been able to dredge up seated before the might of Arda. “You wound me, Dark One. Here I was thinking we were almost friends before you set me in my place.”

Morgoth smirked, “I fear I favor cruelty. It is such a delightful thing to watch the light drain from another’s eyes.”

Maedhros set the pitcher down. His father’s hand climbed his arm to rest with warmth upon his shoulder bone. “I would not know.”

“You may discover its sweetness for yourself one day. And perhaps that day is not so far off. Tell me, son of Fëanor, have you an answer for me?”

Maedhros brought his goblet to his lips, taking a slow sip. 

“Delay him,” Fëanor warned. “And keep your temper under check. You are the only soul in the world who might dance with him, but the steps are a tangle. Do not rouse his wrath.”

Fëanor’s words washed with the rain of love over him. His father put aside the hate that had consumed him in his pursuit of Morgoth to caution Maedhros to soft stepping and dancing with Fëanor’s mortal enemy. His father loved him more than he hated. 

“It is no easy thing you asked of me,” he mused.

Morgoth’s mouth wore a smile sated as fresh sex. “No, it was not. But only a fool would turn it aside. And you do not strike me as a fool.”

Maedhros’ thumb caught a droplet of wine sliding slowly down the outer bowl of his goblet. “No. I am not.” 

He tapped his finger against the gold as Morgoth waited, that savoring smile still caught on his mouth. Maedhros wanted to hurl his goblet into that smug face. His father’s hand upon his shoulder steadied him. “You must understand my predicament. You ask me to betray my father’s last wishes.”

“They need not be his last if you accept my offer.” Morgoth sat forward, face picking up animation as he sold his pitch again. “Yours is a mind of logic. You can pursue the course most beneficial to your people without the static of messy emotions clouding your judgment. We have a common enemy, you and I, in the Valar. We can help each other. All I ask is your allegiance and your people’s. You are the king of the Noldor and the Head of the House of Fëanor, if you say it will be so, it will be so. You are a charismatic man; you will lead your people into the right path.” 

“We must not punch him in the mug, no we must not,” Fëanor snarled, eyes backlit with the fire of his hate and vengeance. Maedhros’ mouth twitched. It should not have amused him to see his father still raging exactly as he had in life, but it was fight the smile or succumb to the fear.

“Now, to the matter of the Valar,” Morgoth’s forked tongue paused to send a smile at Maedhros as if they were old comrades plotting war together. “They pose a dangerous threat to the Noldor’s freedom. Cast your thoughts back to the Curse they placed upon you as they exiled you from lands they claim dominion over –as if such creatures who crawl upon their bellies in the dust can rule another when they cannot even rule their own house—that was an ill-wind they blew upon your faces. As long as the Valar survive, that Curse holds Power. Cast them from their thrones however, and you gain your freedom.”

“But as you know, the Valar’s downfall promises more than only a broken Curse.” Morgoth’s eyes glinted dark, as if with the dirt of a thousand graves. “Throw down the Keeper of the Keys to Death’s Hall, and you throw open its doors. Think of what you may gain if you join with me: Finwë, re-born. Fëanor, re-born. All your dead slain by those false-friends the Teleri, all the dead the Valar swallowed in their retaliation.” 

“How convenient of him to fail to mention the people we lost when his minions cut them down.” But Fëanor had overthrown his hate enough to focus his attention on Maedhros’ face, watching it and only it as Morgoth spun his lies. 

“I do not make the promise of Death’s Halls emptied lightly. You may think I would deny you your father and grandfather’s lives, but it is not so. Unfortunate necessity forced my hand in the matter of your grandfather’s death. If Finwë had but stepped aside, he need not have died. I can be a merciful lord.”

Maedhros could not let this lie pass unchallenged. “Indeed? I find it strange that you would claim mercy as your providence when it was for naught but greed over the works of my father’s hands that you slew my grandfather. A lord cannot be both a murderer for covetous gain and merciful.”

Morgoth’s smile sliced diamond-hard. “Ah, but I did not kill Finwë for the mere sake of gems –beautiful as they are.” Fëanor’s hand tightening on Maedhros’ shoulder restrained him as much as it restrained his father. They were in this together. “You are very young yet in the history of the world, your people but babes upon its face. You cannot comprehend the scope of millennium I have waged my war upon the kin I have renounced as the hypocrites, scavengers, and whelps of mongrel bitches they are who I will crush into the dust until their wails scrape the outermost reaches of this galaxy, before I snap their necks.” Rage contorted his face like streaks of blood across high cheekbones, and from his lips flew spittle.

His burnt hands clenched and unclenched on the table’s black-stone face. Maedhros held his face blank until the rolling, clashing waves of Power dark as thunder caps had pulled back under Morgoth’s skin. Despise him as Maedhros did, this was still the Power at whose feet mountains formed or met their graves at Morgoth’s whim.

When Morgoth had pulled the face of a rational being on again, he continued as if nothing had occurred. “I never sought war with the Noldor.” 

Maedhros’ face flickered with incredulity, and his father had a few comments to hiss under his breath. 

Morgoth did not explode in rage again though, only nodded, mouth playing a smile. But the lines of his face came as through a veil of shadows, the darkness under his skin not so easily put aside. “You think of my time in Tirion before my…departure,” Morgoth’s tongue curled around the word, savoring. “I admit myself envious of your people’s achievements at the time, as I myself was reduced to the level of beggar at the door, watched like a criminal already found guilty even after my so-call-pardon –and this after unjust imprisonment by those who had totted out the title of _kin_ fresh for the occasion.” Morgoth sunk back into brooding thoughts, the conversation left to hang like a tree branch poorly snapped. 

“It is his weakness.” Maedhros’ eyes abandoned the Vala to trace the beloved lines of his father’s face as Fëanor continued, “He cannot see what he has become. He still believes himself in the right and the other Valar as the ones who wronged _him_. His blindness knows no bounds, and blindness can be dangerous, but it can also be weakness. If he were a less intelligent beast –yes, I can admit he is that whatever else he is—we could have used this against him easily. But he will not fall even to his weakness without a perfectly played game.”

/ _He has not even an illusionary honor-code. Even that we could have used in this farce of an alliance he wants of our people. He will turn and devour us the moment the Valar are dealt with, and think himself justified to do so._ /

“Yes.” Fëanor’s hand slid from Maedhros’ shoulder to cup his face. “We have been his captives many years, our son, and seen the full measure of his blackened heart and exactly how far he has sunk himself into the monster. He lacks even a scrap of honor. His words spill from a womb of deceit, and any mercy he might once have possessed has been eaten by worms.”

/ _I know what he is. Do not think me a naïve child to look for a glimmer of redemption in him_ /

Fëanor’s thumb brushed over Maedhros’ chin. His eyes were the light of morning, under which the darkness of night must wither. “A naïve child would not be sitting here now, dinning with a Dark God and matching him wit for wit.” The pride in Fëanor’s voice filled Maedhros like the scent of sweet honeysuckle. 

Morgoth had roused himself to turn the smile of a conspirator on Maedhros, as if touching upon some shared, secret humor. “Or perhaps it was not envy but boredom. In all my Ages I have never found a duller existence –outside of my imprisonment—then the playground my _kin_ set up for themselves. They are as lacking in imagination and _entertainment_ , as ever.”

“Either way,” he waved a dismissive hand through the air, the degree of burning on his hand displayed. “It was never my intention to begin a war with the Noldor. Poisoning the Trees, even seizing the Silmarils, were offensive strikes in my war against the Valar. I could not, after all, allow my work to be undone by the breaking of the Silmarils and the re-birth of the Trees. If Elves suffered in my attack against the Valar, it was a natural consequence of choosing the lands of the Valar to settle in, nothing more.”

Morgoth’s covetousness had been there in his eyes for any to see, for all he attempted to bury it now in his valley of lies. He could spin gold from his mouth and promise the world, but Maedhros did not believe a word of it. Oh, Morgoth might well have set aside his feud with the Noldor long enough to finish the other Valar –the allegiance he demanded of Maedhros spilling precious Noldor-blood in the doing—but when he had conquered his kin, he would turn like the snake he was upon them. His hatred of them and the House of Fëanor would not be forgotten until the world’s braking. 

“As for the matter of Fëanor’s death, that was Fëanor’s doing. Though I have pledged my help in his re-birth should you but choose the correct path.” 

Maedhros couldn’t listen to this, he couldn’t listen. But his father took his hand in his, strangely calm, as if Morgoth’s words could no longer touch him, or as if they mattered nothing to the strain Maedhros was only just keeping under the surface. 

This was not his father’s hand, but Maedhros squeezed it all the same, and looked away from Morgoth’s face to his father’s. Fëanor’s eyes searched him with an intensity that laid itself over Maedhros’ cracking defenses like balm. Not his father. But not alone.

“You will recall that Fëanor attacked _my_ forces, not the other way round. I had no choice but to defend myself. But I am a reasonable lord. I can forgive his trespasses against me, for I recognize that the unfortunate circumstances of Finwë’s death would have appeared to him an act of war. But that is all in the past –or it could be.” 

Morgoth settled his elbows on the tabletop, and threaded his fingers together. “I ask very little in return for your sworn alliance and your alliance. Such a little thing I ask. And so much you have to gain! Your enemies, the Valar’s downfall, the re-birth of those you _love_ , even reunion with those your father’s hasty deeds sundered from you. Think of it, son of Fëanor: Valinor open for your taking, and all those left behind reunited with you. Your _beloved_ in your arms again.”

Morgoth offered Fingon as if Fingon was his for the giving. But Maedhros thrust his thoughts aside from that name, that face. Fingon was gone. Maedhros would never see him again.

He twirled the stem of his wine glass, free hand not unlinking from his father’s for a moment. “I have considered your offer.”

Morgoth’s Power slammed into him. He couldn’t help his flinch from it as the Dark God pawed through his mind. The invasion lasted no more than one passage of a weaver’s shuttle, but seemed to drag on indefinitely. 

Morgoth’s mouth curled, something like wonder there but not, because a monster had lost all ability to experience simple wonders. “I do believe you have, and extensively. How extraordinary. You surprise me, son of Fëanor. You are almost as calculating as myself. Your father would have cursed me and spat upon my hand. Alas. For all Fëanor’s greatness, he never did learn the value of sticky alliances. But you have, haven’t you?”

Maedhros could have been sick on the floor, but offended sensibilities were nothing but weakness here. Morgoth delighted in disturbing him. It was all a game, and one he would win if Maedhros allowed himself to be overcome. The trickiest stretch was upon him. He could not falter now.

What he needed now –desperately—was more time. If he could delay for but a few days, it might buy him the time he needed with the she-Orc, or some other avenue of manufacturing his own escape. 

“You offer much, I do not deny it. But what you ask is the impossible. You know the conditions of the Oath my House swore. You know it cannot be broken, not even by the might of your will.” Maedhros spread his hands out like an offering. “So you see my hands as tied.”

Morgoth’s fingers traced the shape of his mouth, dark eyes picking up a red-flare as the Thangorodrim spat a sulky tongue of lava that splattered against the volcano’s blackened side like some perverse cluster of rubies. “In exchange for the alliance of the House of Fëanor, and the sworn pledge of the king of the Noldor to my war against the Valar, I would be willing to part with the Silmarils –even to the number of all three.”

Perhaps Morgoth would have begrudged their absence from his crown long enough to buy the House of Fëanor off, but only until he plucked them off the corpses of the Fëanorions after he’d betrayed them. But now Maedhros was caught. He had been banking on the Oath to draw this out as they feinted back and forth words of an alliance they would never reach. He needed more time.

“Do not outright refuse him!” Fëanor warned, the first note of true alarm braided into his voice. “You must stall him!”

/ _There is nothing I can do! He has me cornered. I have no more excuses to invent, and he knows it. I have been hamstrung._ /

“No you _must_ delay him!” Fëanor rose from his perch upon the table in his agitation.

 _/I am sorry, Father, but we both knew the odds of this ending in any way but my death were stacked against me from the first._ /

Fëanor swung out of his aggressive pace to pierce Maedhros’ face with a look a war between desperation and despair. This, whatever this was, may not be his father, but it –they—would mourn him. “Maedhros, do you not understand? No, no, we can see that you do not, and we wish that you never would come to understand. Naïve you are not, but you still have a measure of innocence. An innocence we would do anything to protect.”

/ _I may have some small measure left, but not so much I cannot see how this will end if I fail to meet Morgoth’s demands. He will kill me./_

“No, our son, he will destroy you,” Fëanor’s voice trembled with the tender in his heart, and the jagged cut of the truth. “He will destroy you, and only after everything you are or ever could have been has been devoured by a monster, will the monster let you die.”

Maedhros felt like he was a tree all the leaves had been stripped of. He had known terrible things awaited him, but his mind shied away and shied away again. He was scared. He was scared and he wanted Fingon. He wanted—

“Shh, shh,” Fëanor had moved back to him, and stroked his face now, the heat of his touch the mirror of the soul he was only three echoes of. “You know now, you know. But you will defeat this. And we will not leave you. We promise.”

His father had promised that too. His real father. But in the end Fëanor hadn’t been able to keep even one of his promises.

And then there was no time for fears and lions lounging in the darkness of this dungeon. No one was coming to save Maedhros, not Fingon, not Fëanor. He had only his own wits and courage.

“What do you choose, son of Fëanor? Will your choice be the right one? Or will you cling to your pride as your father would have?”

Time. He needed more time. One last play. “I do not trust you—”

“I did not expect you to. You are not a fool.”

Maedhros did not acknowledge the words. “The ‘right’ course is subjective to the judgment of each man’s conscience, and I can but choose what I deem most beneficial to my House and people. You were correct in your assessment that I, at least among my House, can perceive even a sticky alliance’s advantages: I accept your offer.”

Morgoth’s face reflected his satisfaction strongly enough a purr would not have been out of place.

He needed to press the she-Orc harder, but with a care. He could not afford for her to disappear for even a day. A weapon could be sacrificed; he could kill with his bare-hands until he’d attained one. Even a map through the twisting halls could be done without, though that would heighten the likelihood of his failure exponentially. He must act today –tomorrow at the latest—he was already wringing the last drops of time as it was and—

And then there was no more time.

“Prove it.”

Maedhros raised a brow, his father circling behind him to lay his hands on his shoulders like a shield at his back. “I have given you my word. I assure you, it means more to me than yours does to you. My honor is not broken lightly.”

Morgoth rose to his feet, head seeming to stab the ceiling, so lofty did it reach. Upon his brow the Silmarils flashed, a spike of white light like a flash-flood sweeping over them both. Morgoth grimaced in the light’s aftermath, but if the light had pained him, he showed no signs of it. The band of iron between his brow and the jewels that had burned his hands was thick and spell-crafted.

“I am no more a fool than you, son of Fëanor. Honor is made much of amongst your people, but honor _can_ be broken. So I will have your oath of allegiance. Now.”

Maedhros took his time rising to his own height. His father slipped behind him, pressing a length of heat against his side. He was not alone in the pit of darkness. He dug deep, down passed the welling panic squeezing his throat, and found a cool well there waiting him.

He curled an appreciative smirk over his mouth. “Well, whatever was said of you in Tirion, fool was not one of them. But come,” he spread his hands, palm up. “I am a captive wholly under your power with no hope of escape. Do you begrudge me but a few days to accustom myself to the selling of my soul? Such an oath deserves proper care taken to its weight.”

“As you weighed your words before sealing your fate to Fëanor’s jewels?”

“I have learned the value of consideration. As you have said: mine is a people of babes. We have much still to learn.”

Morgoth’s eyes narrowed. “I begin to feel your slippery skin, oh king of the Noldor. Take a care.”

Maedhros shrugged one shoulder, pouring ease and elegance into it. He must be cool, no sweat upon his palms, no flinches, not even a twitch. Nothing could betray him. “From what I have observed, you favor servants with a crafty mind coupled with their ruthlessness. Do I not please you? I am –after all—to be yours.” 

Morgoth’s pupils dilated. Ah, yes, Maedhros had read him well. Fëanor’s blood sworn body and soul to him would be a tantalizing thought.

Morgoth slowly prowled closer, Maedhros’ head rose to meet him. “A few more days is not too great a boon to grant for such a prize. You would have been caught by your clever-tongue if your mind was not already mine for the taking.” Maedhros stiffened. “Oh, yes,” Morgoth’s mouth danced with a smile like a shark’s. “You grasped too eagerly and revealed yourself. What a scheming little mind you have, pretty pet. Not that all your plots would have availed you. Escape is impossible. But now, what to do with the snake in the grass I have caught?”

“Apologize.” Maedhros would have indulged his shock that _Fëanor_ of all beings on Arda advised apologies to _Morgoth_ , but there was no room left in this stranglehold for even the forming of a thought to pass back.

He put on a sheepish smile, like a boy caught by his father doing wrong. “Can you fault me for seizing any opportunity presented? Would you not have done the same during your imprisonment?”

Morgoth did not look amused, but nor had his temper roused. “I will not be _lied_ to. You will find, son of Fëanor, that my servants who do never get the chance to do so again.”

Maedhros lowered his eyes. “I apologize.”

“Hmm.” Maedhros looked up to find Morgoth studying him with a pinched brow. “I have grown weary of your silver-tongue. It amused me for a time, but bridle it now or I will have it removed.” Fëanor’s hand dropped to cradle Maedhros’ lower back, pressing a wave of heat and strength into him. “Now, I will have you oath, son of Fëanor.”

Vying for more time would carry him exactly nowhere. There were no more last moves, no more feet he could drag. 

“Swear it.” His father’s voice dropped flat, but hard with resolve.

/ _What? How can you—how could I—_ /

“We will find a loophole in its wording. If you modify a lord’s oath of sovereign, there are a few ways to duck out of it we can think of. Call upon no witnesses but yourself and Morgoth, and name death your punishment for breaking it. Morgoth is Power, but he has perverted himself. There is no question that he can influence the Song and pay you back with death for betrayal, but you are our son and keeper of no little Power yourself. You can bend the Song’s notes from him –with your brothers behind you. It can be done.”

“Very well,” Maedhros said aloud.

Morgoth’s eyes flashed triumph. “I see we have come to understand each other at last. Now, to your oath’s wording.” His smile twisted into cruel mockery. “The Oath you swore beside your father shall do nicely, with the proper re-wording. As your loyalty is such a _weighty_ matter, it is only justified you should swear before Ilúvatar, and let your damnation for oath-breaking be the Eternal Darkness.”

Maedhros felt like a man who’d braced his shoulder against a spider’s web, only for it to give way under his weight and send him crashing to the dirt. / _I cannot swear it. I cannot swear that oath._

“I know.” Fëanor’s voice sounded like he’d been punctured by the arrows of gods. “I know.”

Maedhros shook inside his skin, but his head rose like a prince, like the king of the Noldor, and he threw his gaze at Morgoth and watched the Vala’s triumph falter. He took the sweetness of that, of the rage bloating the air around Morgoth, and his father’s hand hot and strong on his back, and hid them under his tongue where they could never be stolen from him whatever came next.

“ _No_. I will not swear to you. I will not crawl and scrape for you Morgoth Bauglir, king of worms! What a fool you are to have ever believed, even for a moment, that you could win such as I? That you could come within a star’s distance to seizing even the dust-trail of my loyalty is the greatest joke of your pathetic existence.”

Morgoth let out a bellow, Power striking the ceiling in a bolt of black lightning. The fire-storm of his rage shook the chamber, sending the table to its knees, and flinging the double doors crashing open.

“Run. _Run_.” His father’s voice begged him, but Maedhros would not run. There was nowhere to go, and he was the son of fire.

The Balrog guards filled the door from floor to lintel, shrinking it to a doll-house next to their girth. Maedhros stood tall and proud, face shinning defiance, hair snapping a red serpent’s tail in the winds blasting off the Dark God he stood unbowed before. He faced the wrath of a creature that could crush him like a bug. The fear was there, but the pride and courage conquered all.

Morgoth pulled his Power back by inches until he wore the pretence of beauty again, and only the cloud of darkness hovering behind him like wings gave away the lie. “You have proved yourself a fool, son of Fëanor,” Morgoth hissed like a storm hisses the first whisper of its breaking. “But in the end you _will_ bow to me.” 

He raised his hand to the Balrogs, and they stepped forward like dogs to his bidding to shackle Maedhros’ wrists. “When the rose fails to woo, one must rely upon the thorns to finish the job. It will be your own name, and your father’s name, you curse before the end.” 

To the Balrogs Morgoth ordered: “Take him to Marion, and have Gothmog summoned. We shall see if that slippery-tongue of his has any lies left to spin after his father’s killer has made him scream.”

The Balrogs’ claws upon his shoulder, shoving him towards the door, sunk into him like the battering of a ram of fire. Only their blackened skin wrapped around their cores of fire stopped him from catching on fire and burning with more than a fire’s blisters. His courage faltered, folding in on itself. His legs moved, taking him forward, passed the door, into the outer-hall of crystal, and then out into the greater corridor. He did not know what strength moved him, for he was like a deer the rattlesnake had sunk its fangs into that stumbled its last few steps as the venom worked through his veins until at last he collapsed. 

There was no hope. No hope. He walked towards torment, and there was no hope.

A hand of heat that was not the burning pain of a Balrog took his in a desperate grasp. His eyes rose to find his father’s bright one’s upon him. Fëanor’s form was smudging at the edges, with every step taking them from Morgoth and the Silmarils it grew fainter. 

(No, please, don’t leave me all alone.)

“We will not leave you. Never. We swear we will stay with you,” Fëanor promised him like a prayer. And somehow Maedhros believed him. He _had_ to.

“I am—I am scared, Father.” His voice cracked like a tree. Only after the words passed his lips did he realize he’d spoken aloud. One of the Balrog’s laughed, the sound running down his spine like the tip of a talon.

“We know.” Fëanor’s fingers squeezed tight enough his bones protested, but he clung back. “We –he—is so sorry. We know, we felt—we were made of him. We are him as he is us. We felt him die. We heard his heart weeping to leave you, and his raging against the Dark. He was so sorry. So sorry to leave. We promise not to leave. We are him, and he is us, and he promised never to leave.”

Maedhros’ throat closed. Tears he had not shed since his capture burned against the backs of his eyes. He wanted his father. He wanted to go home.

Fëanor held his hand through the terrible walk that seemed to have no ending, and then ended too soon as they came into the chamber of the Dark Lord’s high lieutenant. Fëanor had dwindled down to a transparent shade, form more fire than flesh, but he did not leave Maedhros. His father walked with him into darkness, and Maedhros was not alone.

A woman had been strapped to a steel table, legs forced open and feet planted to its top. She screamed and thrashed against her bonds. Between her knees a head of hair white as cream with a circlet of woven gold bent. The woman’s belly was swollen with child.

“The Master has orders for the little king,” the Balrog’s voice rumbled behind Maedhros, its sound like the grinding of stones, “we get to make him scream.”

“ _Gothmog_ gets to make him scream,” the second Balrog groused. “We do not get any fun at all. Can we have that she-Elf, Marion? We want some fun.”

The white head lifted, and a delicate-boned face with an androgynous beauty revealed itself. Golden eyes burning with the light of the Ainur flashed at the Balrog, “Cease your whining. If you have so few brain cells in that hideous skull of yours you cannot even find an Orc to play with, then save us all the headache of your existence and run your sword though your chest already.”

The Balrog’s skin ignited with a wash of flame, the growl of a beast filling the chamber, drowning out even the woman’s screams.

Marion straightened, his height nothing to the Balrog’s and yet seeming to dwarf it with the cool slice of one glance. “Thank you for the demonstration of your brute strength and lack of brain matter with your inability to form coherent retorts when insulted. Now stop standing there like the witless dog you are, and be a good hound and fetch Gothmog. Or do you plan to keep our lord’s pleasure waiting while you flex your Power at me?”

The first Balrog rumbled, “The Master told us to take the little king here. You were supposed to see to its punishment.”

Marion raised his eyes to the ceiling with a sigh. “I am quite cable of translating my lord’s wishes even through the filter of your garble. Now go. Leave the prisoner with me.”

The first Balrog stalked from the chamber, slamming the door behind it loud enough to shake stone-dust from the ceiling’s masonry. Marion did not spare Maedhros a glance, but bent his head back between the woman’s legs, hands slipping into the breach of her raised knees.

The second Balrog had not followed Marion’s order, but lingered to pick over his offense with the lieutenant of Morgoth like a dog picking at a bone. “The Master will not be pleased when I tell him of how you ignored his orders to play with your she-Elf.”

Marion’s drawling voice came from between the woman’s legs, “You are welcome to run and inform on me. I shall tell you what will happen to you if you do. First, my lord will punish you for wasting his time –and mine—with your complaints when I prudently used my time furthering my experiments instead of loitering in sloth as you do. Second, I will chain you with steel forged by my hands and unbreakable by your petty Powers, and mount you to a pike by your anus cavity. I believe that corner there will server for a mounting place,” Marion waved a hand coated in blood at the appointed corner. “I will be able to savor your screams until only the groaning of your blackened soul remains. If I am feeling merciful, I will release you before your life utterly expires so you may crawl away to your dog kennel.”

Fire crackled down the Balrog’s arms, “Your failed experiments are not of more value to the Master than my terror and sword upon the battlefield!”

“My experiments are unquestionably more important, as anything of mine will ever be.” 

Marion stood, and walked to a table laid out with gleaming knives. He selected one with a slender blade perfect for cutting through flesh, and took his place at the screaming woman’s side again. He settled the point of the knife to the side of the woman’s navel, and angled it with a precise turn of a pale wrist. He cut a slow line into the woman’s belly. When the cut had reached a length he desired, he set the knife aside and plunged his hands into the cavity. 

Hands up to the wrists in the woman, his cool, glowing eyes rose to the Balrog. “Now, I believe I told you to go. Your presence grates on me. Think what a tragedy it would be for you if I had to inform my lord of how the headache you set in my temples negatively impacted my experiment –which is of _extreme_ interest to my lord.”

The Balrog flung himself towards the door, wings of shadow demonstrating the full power of its sulk. Marion did not glance up as the door crashed shut behind the Balrog. He said as he pulled a tinny, furry baby from its mother’s womb, “I shall need to replace that door if they continue to abuse my property so.”

He looked up at Maedhros for the first time, the half-breed child held out from his body, and the umbilical cord still linking it with its mother. “Come over here and make yourself useful, Elf.”

Maedhros did not move.

Marion adjusted the child to a one-arm hold and began sweeping fingers through its mouth to clear the blood. He smiled, face cold and inhuman as stone. “You do not want to make me angry. My anger is not my lord’s. I will take my time with your unmaking.”

Maedhros’ eyes glinted, lip curling as he could not afford to let it tremble. His father’s hand held his, warm and tight and there. “As I am already awaiting torment, Maia, I shall pass on the offer of assisting in your torture of that woman.”

“Who said anything about torturing her? If I was torturing her, you would know. No, I want you to come here and cut this cord, and then I want you to take the hybrid over to that basin and clean it.” When Maedhros still did not move, Marion said, “Do you wish to stand there while I tell you in excruciating detail exactly what the beast will do to you, or do you want to put your mind to work on something else?”

Maedhros conceded the Maia had a point with his second. He would prefer to take his mind off the fear eating away at him. He strode forward, ignoring the pleased smirk on Marion’s face, and selected one of the knives. His shackles jangled as his hands rose to cut the umbilical cord. 

The mother’s screams had died when she’d fallen into unconsciousness, but the infant had not yet begun to squall. Marion frowned at it, and turned it over to slap its back. Once, twice, again. Still nothing.

Frown darkening, he laid the furred little thing down and began inspecting it, feeling its pulse and working to get its lungs started. But the infant had probably been dead before it left its mother’s womb. He tossed the corpse onto the floor. “A waste of my time. I _despise_ wasted time.”

Maedhros had taken the mother’s pulse while Marion searched for life in the infant. He found one, but faint. It would be a mercy if she never woke.

Maedhros fingers fell away from her throat as Marion approached him with a knife. “Oh, none of that.” Marion twirled the blade in his fingers. “It seems you did not have the sense to accept my lord’s generous offer of allegiance, so my lord will determine if that pack of brothers of yours is made up of more sense. They will receive that pretty hair of yours as an…encouragement.” Light glinted off his teeth like a blade’s edge. “So will we be doing this the easy way or the hard?”

Fëanor’s arm slipped around Maedhros’ waist, pulling him flush against his side as he scorched Marion with his eyes. “They cannot take your hair.”

/ _My hair does not matter._ /

Fëanor swung his gaze to him. Maedhros captured that look that spoke _everything_ , and stored it away in his heart. “It matters for it is a part of you. They barter parts of your body, taking it at their will to degrade you and demonstrate their power over you.”

/ _No, let them take it. I want them too, for it is going home to my brothers. Let my brothers have some part of me to burn upon a funeral pyre./_

Fëanor did not argue as Maedhros submitted to the knife. He stood at Maedhros’ shoulder, and watched with dark eyes as Marion’s hands (still wearing the blood of the woman) wove Maedhros’ hair into one thick braid before making the cut.

And then this moment of almost-respite (but nothing like, for Maedhros had not been able to forget what lay ahead) ended. The doors opened on the form of a Balrog. Maedhros could detect no difference in this one over the others but for the black crown it wore between its horns to mark it the lord of Balrogs.

Marion looked up at the Balrog with an unimpressed eye, and said to Maedhros, “It looks like your time is up. This will be messy –Gothmog is always messy—but entertaining. Boredom is a plague. A mind must keep itself amused.”

Fëanor turned Maedhros, pulling him away from the sight of his tormentors to grasp him in eyes with a whole ocean of love and sorrow reflected in them. “You are not alone.”

Maedhros caught at his father’s sleeve like a child. Marion spoke to the Balrog. Its metal-shod feet scraped against the stone as it drew close. Maedhros could feel its heat upon his back. _/Do not leave me, please. I cannot endure. I cannot—/_

“You will endure.” Fëanor cup his face. “You are far far above them. They are maggots crawling in the dust. Your body they will break, but you will endure it and rise again. You are steel, you are starlight, you are _fire_.”

Gothmog laid his burning hands on him, forcing his body to bend and kneel, and then press face-first in the stones from the sheer weight of the Balrog’s form. He had known rape was a possibility, but he’d hoped for a whip, a knife, anything else (hoped even when there should have been no hope left). 

Gothmog torn Maedhros’ clothes apart while Marion watched, settled in a chair and observing his violation as if Maedhros were not flesh and bone and soul but components, like the pieces of a ticking machine.

Fëanor went down to the stones with him, fingers in Maedhros’ hair, pulling his head into his lap, rocking him, holding him, dropping words like supplication into his ear: I am here, I will never leave you, I love you, _forgive me_.

When Gothmog forced his way into Maedhros’ body and his throat opened in a scream of horror and agony, the oath he’d sworn to himself after the ships burned broke. He shattered the wall he’d raised in his mind against its touch with Fingon’s. He’d built it because he was never going to see Fingon again, never, never, never, and better to cut their bond, seal it with impenetrable stonework, then feel the moment Fingon knew he had been betrayed, feel the centuries, Ages Fingon lived without him in anger, grief, healing, laughter…new love.

Maedhros reached out to Fingon, needing him, _needing_ him, please, please, please…a monster tore him open as darkness pressed upon him with a physical weight, plowed its way into the heart of him, ripping, ripping, ripping—

Maedhros’ mind met a wave of fury and hate, high as a tsunami. If there was anything left of their love behind it, he could reach it. He flung himself from the bond, recoiling, slamming it shut.

Claws ripped the skin of his hips. He was burning alive inside and out upon a pyre of fire and shadow. And Fingon was not there. Fingon was never coming back. He was gone, gone, gone, and he _hated_ Maedhros. 

Maedhros could not bear it. He could not bear it. He was alone, forsaken, even his mother’s womb would forget his name for he would die here in this darkness, a slow death while rats feasted upon his flesh.

“Father!” Maedhros clawed at the thighs cradling him, the arms never letting him go. But this was not the one he called for. This was not his father. His father had left him all alone. “Father, help me!”

“I am here. I am here, my little fox. You are not alone. I will never leave you.” 

A monster laughed like death as it raped him, mocking him, calling him mad and broken already, but the lips of true fire, the flame that was beauty and cradling heat, kissed his brow as a cheek wet from weeping pressed against his and it was enough even as it was not enough. It was all he had.


	21. Chapter 18

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 18

Fingon had seen a hound once that had had its back broken. It was on a hunt, back in Tirion when he was still a child in all the ways that meant anything. They’d come across a grizzly up in the mountains. The bear was in a temper, and only became more enraged when the group of Elves trespassed on its territory. One of Fingon’s hounds jumped at the roaring beast, trying to sink its jaws into the bear’s neck. The grizzly, with one powerful swipe of its paws, sent the hound flying into a tree’s trunk and snapped its back. 

Fingon would never forget the way the hound didn’t just give up and die. It kept trying to gain its feet, its upper back still functioning. The hound couldn’t make its back legs work, and whined in that way dogs could that pierced the heart. It started dragging itself over the grass, trying to reach its master, as if believing to its last moment that if it could just reach Fingon, Fingon would make everything better again.

Fingon had seen Elves crawl on their knees across the ice, fingers frozen, unable to find the strength to reach their feet, minds so numbed the only thought remaining was to keep moving, keep moving, keep moving. He still had his legs under him, but he’d buried his heart in the heart of a man with a smile like the mother of all beauty and lips that lied, lied, lied when they whispered in his ear: you are mine and I am yours.

Sometimes, when he lay in the dark, the wind howling across the ice, beating like fists of wrath against the tent’s walls, he felt like nothing so much as that hound who’d been throw against the tree, back broken, but still crawling, still dragging itself through the days with the fire of all the hate he would (one day) be able to force himself into throwing against Maedhros. He told himself if he fanned its fire, it would burn all the pain inside black and dead.

He hadn’t yet discovered how to stop loving Maedhros enough to hate him. But he was working on forgetting him. He could go hours now without allowing one thought to turn Maedhros’ way. 

But though he could stuff Maedhros out of his mind during the long hours of the day –during those endless hours of misery when the world narrowed to the wind cutting into his face, the exhausted eyes of his people on the back he had to keep strong and unbowed (he couldn’t give them smiles anymore, but he could give them this), and the icicle hands of the children who stumbled first, falling to their knees, that Fingon took in his own hands, carrying them until they could push their legs on just a little longer—in the night he could think of nothing else but Maedhros’ lips turned to ice under his own.

No wind screeched over the ice tonight. The stars pressed frozen, untouchable beauty into the dark sky. There didn’t have to be wind peeling the skin off his face like knives, for the temperature to drop into the killing zones.

He pulled the flap of his father’s tent aside, and stepped in. No blast of warmth hit his face. They needed all the space on the wagons for food; there had been none left to spare for fuel for fires. It was only due to the endurance of the horses from Oromë’s herds that they were able to even dare the venture of the Ice, without them this would have been a suicide march.

Fingolfin sat in a pile of furs, only one lone candle to work by. Everything had to be rationed down to the last match stick. Turgon’s presence within the tent was not one Fingon expected. If Turgon and his little family had kept to themselves in Tirion, it was nothing to the way Turgon had closed his arms about his wife and daughter’s shoulders, huddling them close to his sides and sparing few thoughts for those around him. Turgon was not cruel or lacking in sympathy for the suffering around him, but with the constant threat of death, his priorities had narrowed down to his wife and daughter.

Fingolfin and Turgon looked over at his entrance. His eyes fell to Guilin’s bundled-up-figure leaning droopy-eyed against Turgon’s hip. Turgon’s heavy mantel enfolded Guilin like his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“Fingon,” Fingolfin offered him a tired smile. 

“Father,” he nodded as he stepped to them. 

Guilin lifted his head at the sound of his voice. Yawning, he lifted his arms up as if he were still a toddler. “Daddy, ‘m tired.”

“I can see that,” he picked Guilin up, settled the boy on his hip. Guilin laid his head down on Fingon’s shoulder, legs long enough to wrap about his waist and meet on the other side for a pair of crossed ankles.

Fingolfin said, “Turgon and Elenwë watched him this evening. I did not expect the patrol to stretch so long, did you encounter any trouble?”

He shrugged, “Nothing of consequence. There is a patch of weak ice a few miles north, but it should not be a problem.” To Turgon he nodded stiffly, “The assistance is appreciated.”

Turgon turned him a dismissive glance. “It would not have been necessary if you had thought even two steps ahead. You should have realized Father had too many duties to watch your boy. You do not have the luxury to indulge your ego by leading patrols others could have executed just as well and saddling everyone around you with your responsibilities. You are a father; it is time you acted like one.”

“So full of advice tonight, _brother_. Wise Prince Turgon: he-who-can-do-no-wrong-and-loves-to-pick-at-everyone-else’s-failings.”

“That is enough,” Fingolfin rose, furs sliding off his shoulders, “we will not tear chucks out of each other like wolves. There are no enemies in this tent. Now, you will both apologize to each other.” When neither Turgon nor Fingon moved to follow their father’s words, Fingolfin’s voice dropped low and weary (Fingon would not put it passed his father to use emotional manipulation to get what he wanted out of them). “You are brothers. We already face enough hardship outside these walls; let us not bring strife into our family bonds as well. We have only each other’s shoulders to lean on in a land that would see us all dead.”

Fingon bent first, the quicker to take offence between the two, and the quicker to lay it back down. Turgon could nurse a grudge like a dog gnawing a bone. 

Fingon’s mouth could have lifted in a charming, boyish smile as he said cheekily ‘Friends again?’ And hold out his hand, wiggling his fingers until Turgon took them. But he didn’t because that was the man who hadn’t married his soul to a betrayer.

He couldn’t bring the smile to his mouth that would have made Turgon cave. He could only say, “Father is right. Let’s not see enemies where there are none.”

Turgon gave him a stiff nod. Neither of them apologized as such, but both had meant those words with too much of themselves to do so. Turgon took his brisk leave, heading back to his family’s tent where he would shut himself up in their arms and the rest of the world out.

Fingon carried Guilin over to the bed of furs the three of them would be sharing tonight to conserve warmth. He heard his father take up his work again, the flame of the candle flickering shadows against the tent walls when he brought it close to examine someone’s hasty writing. Fingon lowered Guilin into the furs. The boy let out a sleepy grumble, trying to burrow back into the warmth of his father’s shoulder. 

“Would you not speak to me, Fingon?”

Fingon’s back stiffened at his father’s soft words. “We found some sturdy ice near the shore that shows promise of a safe fishing spot—”

“You know I was not asking for a report on the patrol.”

Fingon’s jaw clenched, and he focused on working Guilin’s feet out of the boots. Guilin had already dozed off again. “If you are asking me not to respond when he says something like _that_ —”

“You have every right to defend yourself. But once that argument would have ended differently. Once that argument would have never begun. Once you would have shrugged off Turgon’s words like they were nothing, having heard a hundred like them before.”

Fingon teeth gritted as he tucked Guilin’s legs under the furs, pulling them up to cover his son. “That person no longer exists.”

Silence dropped behind him for a long moment before his father broke it, “I would have him back. I wish that all this anger that has you snapping and closing down as you once never—” 

Fingon spun around. “Well I am sorry to disappoint you –yet again—but that person is _dead_.” He regretted the words immediately. His father’s face looked worn, carrying shadows and creases in the candle’s light, but it was the sadness in his eyes that had his tongue shriveling up on itself.

His father’s voice dropped quiet as snowfall, “I would have that person back not because I do not love who you have become, but because this person is in so much pain.”

Fingon lowered his head, staring down at his fisted hands. How many times had they had a conversation nearly identical to this one in the months since the Betrayal? How many times had he run off on patrol, burnt himself exhausted working among their people because those duties were light compared to the weight in his chest making it hurt to breathe? And how many conversations ended with him making his father, Aredhel, his cousins, everyone miserable because he couldn’t bear to see them creating little moments of happiness, finding purpose and life after the Betrayal when he was so destroyed?

Fingolfin sighed, the sound pained and weary. Maedhros would have known— Fingon slammed the door on that thought. Maehdros wasn’t here. 

It wasn’t just his lover, his husband, who had betrayed him; it was his best friend, his brother in all the ways that mattered. Maedhros wasn’t here to quirk his mouth at him and say the perfect thing to pull him into a smile. And Fingon could tell himself he didn’t care, he didn’t care, he didn’t care a thousand times, but he would still be missing Maedhros and cursing Maedhros and loving Maedhros with the wholeness of his being.

He rose from the furs and went to his father. His hand dropped to Fingolfin’s shoulder, a silent peace offering. His father shouldn’t look so surprised. Fingon had done that, one snapped word and closed shoulder after another. He didn’t like this angry person he’d become, but he didn’t know how to move passed this.

“I will try harder, Father.”

Fingolfin hand came up to close over his. “I just want to see you happy again, but I know…I know Maedhros—”

Fingon’s hand jerked away. “Don’t try to pretend you understand. What did you lose? Just a half-brother who never liked you anyway.”

Fingolfin’ sucked in a breath, but Fingon stood at the back of his father’s shoulder and was spared a glimpse of his face.

“Father…” His hands found his father’s shoulders. His head dropped, cheek meeting the smooth fall of his father’s hair. “Forgive me.”

He was a poor son and a poor father. Sometimes he wondered if Fingolfin looked at him and wished Turgon had been his firstborn. Responsible, honorable Turgon who did no wrong. Turgon who made princehood look easy, the perfect father, the ever-loving and faithful husband with his oh-so-wise and noble council.

And then there was Fingon: running from his responsibilities, with the intellect of a dull-blade, a whore, and now a tongue-lashing-out because he felt so forsaken inside.

His father wrapped his hands about his wrists. “I love you.” 

Fingon squeezed his eyes shut. His father had to go and be what anyone could ever want in a father. “And I you.” 

He lifted his brow from his father’s head, and Fingolfin turned his face until Fingon caught just the glimmer of an eye, a slice of skin washed warm as amber in the candlelight. “We are more than the wreckage of their betrayal. You are so much more.”

Fingon’s mouth turned up in the shadow of a smile, nothing more than a twist of lips. He rubbed his thumbs into the muscles of his father’s shoulders, gradually pressing harder. He didn’t have the words for what his father meant to him, so he took care of him, speaking with his hands. 

Fingolfin let out a huffing laugh as Fingon’s hands massaged over his shoulders. “You have not done this for me since Tirion.”

Fingon found his smile deepening as it hadn’t for months. “You had the worst stiff neck with Grandfather’s crown on your brow.”

“Well, I had some rather spectacular headaches, all those lords pecking into my ears.”

“Hissing you mean?” Fingon slid his hands over the curve of his father’s shoulders, rounding their ends.

Fingolfin hummed, rolling his head forward. Fingon’s thumbs pressed down on either side of his father’s spine, pulling a groan out of him as the knots worked out. “I have never found anyone who gave as good massages as you.”

Light, teasing words found their way to Fingon’s mouth, and he almost felt like crying. He hadn’t teased anyone in so long. “I have _very_ good hands.”

Fingolfin laughed, “I can attest to that.”

Fingon didn’t want to dam the light words up when they spilled like fresh water from his mouth, “I think I will let that get around: Fingon has _very_ good hands, just ask his father. Guaranteed to have you groaning in less than a minute.”

Fingolfin shook, laughter silent and deep. Fingon had mercy on him and kept back the next few comments forming in his mind, each more deprived than the last. 

Fingolfin lifted his head, crooking his head back at him, eyes so full of love Fingon’s heart constricted. “My clever boy. I still remember how happy it made you when you picked up a bow for the first time. You had good hands even back then. They just _knew_ what to do. It was amazing to watch.”

“Well, I suppose my brain had to have been born somewhere. I am sure my tutors would have preferred it in my head though.” The words had come out with more self-deprecation than he intended.

Fingolfin’s smile slipped away. “I wish you would not criticize yourself like that. There is nothing wrong with your intellect.”

Fingon applied more pressure to his father’s shoulders, using the excuse of taking the massage deeper to work out some of the knots those words had tied in his belly. “Don’t pretend Turgon isn’t a hundred times cleverer than me.”

“Is he?” Fingolfin raised a brow, wrinkles forming in his neck as he turned back an inch more, braids gathered and falling over the opposite shoulder. “Turgon does not have your tongue’s wit, and his hands cannot pull a melody from harp strings or wield a bow with the skill to rival a Teler. Yes, in other areas he surpasses you, but do not hold your own intellect as nothing. It is different, not inconsequential.”

“Father,” Fingon sighed as he pulled his hands away. “I appreciate what you are trying to do, but I am not a child anymore. I can see quite clearly all the places I have not lived up to what you –if not desired—then at least needed in an heir.”

Fingolfin turned fully to face him. “No, I do not think you do see clearly if you would call your talents worth less than Turgon’s.”

Fingon raised brow, “How will playing a harp or winning Tulkas’ footrace every Games make a good prince and right-hand like you need?”

Fingolfin shook his head, a fond, disbelieving smile on his lips. “Do you truly not see the many strengths you possess? Tell me, Fingon, how many of our people have Turgon got down on his knees to lift out of the ice and carry on his back? Tell me how many smiles Turgon brought the mouths of our men after Alqualondë when the horror was choking us to death? Tell me how many eyes fix upon Turgon’s back as the wind whips us raw and the only thing keeping our people going is their prince forging on, strong and loved, before them?”

“But you…you were born to be a king, and Turgon is so like you. He will be able to draw up treaties and trade agreements and head a Council of Lords with ease, just like you do. Turgon is the one—”

“Fingon,” his father’s hands took his, slipping through his. “It is not Turgon who I see the most of myself in. It is you.”

Fingon shoot his head. “You never struggled in your studies, or spent your hours on the Athletes’ fields, or—”

“When I was young I did struggle in some of my studies.” Fingon blinked. “But you see, with competition like Fëanor, I had to push myself, work as hard as I could until I excelled. You have that same need to win in you, only instead of competing against a genius brother you will never outstrip, you trained your body. You honed it into a piece of art, until even just walking into a room with that mix of power and air of carelessness you possess, makes eyes cling, and not an Elf in Valinor was able to boast they were the better athlete than you.” 

Fingolfin turned Fingon’s hands palm up, thumbs rubbing circles over the lines threaded through them. “You and I are similar in so many ways, our differences lay in the paths our lives took, not the natures we were born with. It is Turgon, not you, who I find myself struggling to understand at times.” 

His father leaned in and pressed a kiss to his brow. “Never doubt that I adore you for a moment. I will always adore you.”

Fingon spoke back with his hands, slipping them into the braids falling down his father’s back and pulling Fingolfin into an embrace. He shut his eyes and rested his head on his father’s shoulder. The pain inside eased, receded far enough he could breathe without every breath pulling in like a punctured lung. Maedhros had betrayed him, but it no longer felt like his backbone would never snap back together again. He no longer had his husband, but he had his father, his son, his family. 

“Thank you, Father.”

Fingolfin turned his mouth into Fingon, and found the tip of his ear to kiss. His lips were chapped from hours under the wind’s aggressive beating. “Forgive him. Forgive him and be yourself again.”

Fingon’s breath shook out of him. “He betrayed me.”

“I forgave Fëanor.” Fingolfin’s voice floated into his ear, no more than a whispered confession. “I forgive him. If I did not, I would be eaten up by bitterness inside, and I could not let him do that to me.”

Fingon swallowed. “How can you? He left us like trash, like nothing, like it all, everything we shared together, was _nothing_.” He wasn’t talking about Fëanor.

“Because I can understand how Fëanor came to leave. Just as you understand how Maedhros could have chosen his family over you. But forgiveness does not mean forgetfulness. When we reach this ice’s other side we will see them again. What we say to them, what we chose to do, well, that will be seen, won’t it?”

Fingon’s hands tightened on his father’s shoulders. “It is not that he chose his family over me, I always knew he loved them that much, and now I see he loves them more than he will ever love me, but…I never expected to be betrayed like this. To be…it is like…like I wasn’t worth…”

Fingolfin’s arms tightened about him. “You had a beautiful friendship, and Maedhros loved you like one of his own brothers, do not doubt that Fingon. We do not know what happened when they burned the ships. The only thing we can be sure of is that they would not have burned if Fëanor did not want them to. Maedhros loved his father, and was loyal to him, but do not think he forgot you in his heart. I cannot believe that.”

“Father…” he drew back, needing to read his father’s eyes, “Maedhros and I…we were lovers.”

Fingolfin’s eyes widened, before his face folded in pain on Fingon’s behalf. “Oh, my son.” His father took him into his arms again, smoothing his hands through his braids. “I did not know. Though,” he gave a little laugh devoid of humor, “I have been rather blind, haven’t I?”

“No more blind than I was for so long.”

Fingolfin pulled back, face set with a new conviction. “Fingon, listen to me now. I have known Maedhros for many years, and never once saw him love another outside his family as he loved you. You tell me you were lovers, and I feel it with absolute certainty that he would not have betrayed you of his own choice. That is not who he is.”

Fingon heart arched up, wanting, aching to believe those words. It was not that he had not entertained such hopes in the beginning, but oh how hard they were to maintain, for Maedhros did not come back to him. If it had been Fingon, he would have found a way back to Maedhros, not the sea, not death, not Fëanor, could have kept them apart. But Maedhros did not come. 

Fingolfin saw all his doubt on his face. He squeezed his arms. “Do not give up hope. I feel this in my heart, Fingon, he did not forget you.”

Fingon wished his father would not press hope into his chest, even as he reached out to take it from him, needing it like he’d never needed anything before in his life. He needed to believe in Maedhros’ love, he must, or fall back into a man who made his family miserable with him.

Fingolfin touched his cheek at Fingon slow, but decisive nod. “You have come back to us.”

Fingon’s mouth lifted, eyes sparking with the light of the hope fluttering delicate as a butterfly’s wings in his chest, but fluttering. He stood and offered his hand to his father, helping him to his feet, before they bent and collected the furs Fingolfin had gathered about him and retreated to the furs Guilin slept within. Fingolfin spread the extra furs over the top of their pile, and bundled some up to press against where Fingon and his backs would lie. Fingon shucked his boots and the fur cloak from over his shoulders, and slipped into the bed beside Guilin. Fingolfin took Guilin’s back against his chest so that Guilin’s vulnerable young body would be protected from the cold between theirs. 

Fingon met his father’s eyes across Guilin’s head. Fingolfin’s hand slipped about Guilin’s waist, and under his lax arm to feel for Fingon’s. Fingon set his hand in his father’s and smiled. They would survive this, together, and when they reached the ice’s other side…well, they would see, wouldn’t they? 

*

The ice creaked under the weight of thousands of Elves. It stretched innocently white and sparkling under the light of stars, deceptively beautiful. But there was nothing beautiful in a land that was so cold their skin burned as if held too close to a fire. 

Idril stumbled, hand almost slipping from Elenwë’s grip as a bone-deep exhaustion weighed down Idril’s feet like lead. Elenwë tightened her fingers about her daughter’s hand, ignoring their shrieking to be shoved deep in the folds of her dress, wanting to hide like shy animals from the cruel jaws of the Helcaraxë. 

She pushed aside her own pain. She could walk a little longer (always a little more as she tried to fool her brain into thinking there would be an end to this white, white nightmare). She could do without that extra mouthful of bread. The children came first, always, and if her eyesight blurred hazy about the edges, and her body had long passed the simple state of exhaustion, she kept pressing it to give a little more, another step, and then another.

She set her eyes on her law-father’s back where Fingolfin walked beside Fingon and Galadriel –the ones their people looked to lead them out of this White Death. She did not like to think what would have become of their people without those three leading the way, mapping the treacherous ice, never flinching from being the first to test its strength, and holding back the crippling blade of despair from felling them.

Idril tripped again, hand slipping out of Elenwë’s as her palms reached out instinctively to break her fall. Elenwë’s body seemed to move in slow motion, the stiffness in her limbs turning her reactions sluggish. She bent to pull her daughter up (can’t stop, keep walking, walking, walking, never stop or she won’t get up). She’d seen what befell those Elves who gave into despair, when not even Fingon’s impossible fortitude or Galadriel’s indomitable fire or Fingolfin’s steady-as- a-mountain-root spirit could get them back on their feet as they wailed for Mandos to claim them. In the end, they had no choice but to leave those Elves behind to the death they embraced.

Elenwë did not have the luxury of such thoughts. She had a duty to the children. She felt, at times, that she had been picked and molded by fate for this task, this moment, this trek of anguish. She had been trained from a young age to not only submit to her husband in all things, but be a fierce protector of children. 

Welcome hands joined hers as she gathered Idril up. She glanced up, intending to nod her thanks, since the scarf wrapped over her lower face to break the merciless wind muffled all attempts at speech. But the nod jumped into a smile bending lips stiffened by the cold. 

“Glorfindel!” The wind snatched her voice from her lips, flinging it away.

She drew her son to her breast, tucking his head into the minimal warmth of her side. The boy was ice. Where was her husband? Glorfindel was to be at Turgon’s side. 

Frozen tears crusted Glorfindel’s face, as hers was, their eyes reacting to the harsh winds. His fingers were stuffed into ill-fitting gloves several sizes too big, yet about his shoulders hung a thick, fur-lined cloak of the finest quality, even if it hung over-large and gave the appearance of a boy playing dress-up with his father’s clothing. His hair was a thick banner of tangled gold, and his eyes were the blue of a Valinorion sky –so pure it hurt. 

Elenwë pressed her muffled mouth next to his ear. “Where is Turgon, dear?” 

Glorfindel pointed behind him, but in the Elves shuffling passed she could not spot her husband’s lofty head. “Why are you not at his side?”

He turned white lips towards her. Where was the scarf she bundled him in this morn? “Turgon was with one of the lords and took me with him. You know no one wanders alone. And…and when we were making our way back up to the front my…Irimë, she was there.” 

His hands clutched at Elenwë as if a windstorm had picked up his feet and she were the branch he clung to. She pulled him tighter against her; Idril huddled in the space their legs and bellies formed like a fence against the wind. Glorfindel’s head passed her shoulder, and in truth, he was no boy, but a young man, yet Elenwë cradled him to her breast like her babe. Her protective instincts flexed their claws down her back, pacing like a caged tiger, snarling to break out.

This boy, this troubled, shy child who seemed to be slipping away from her even as she stared right at him, hiding in all the cracks of her thoughts as if he could flit like a shadow beneath everyone’s noticed, was the reason she’d chosen the woman’s sphere over even a delicate toe-touch into the public. He, and children like him with eyes bleeding like wounds, were the reason she had chosen long ago in her youth to take up the training of the _poicindis_. Here was where her heart lay.

“Glorfindel!” Elenwë’s head whipped up with Glorfindel’s at the voice. 

Irimë marched towards them, mouth set in that line of pride and stubbornness Elenwë’ had learned to despise as much as this woman’s face. The tiger thrust itself against the cage’s door. It would tear this one to pieces; rip this woman limb from limb! She kept the cage door locked –for now—and tightened her hold about Glorfindel.

He was so much more than a boy under her care. He was as a son to her. The night he agreed to call her mother blazed in a world gone dark.

They had left Tirion behind, turning their feet up the coast, marching North. Glorfindel had finished his evening chores and tucked himself beneath his blankets in their family tent. The glow of the coals piled in their small heater, afforded enough light for Elenwë to work a comb through Idril’s hair as she prepared her daughter for bed. Duties had taken her husband from the comfort of his family and out into a cold they had believed so bitter back before they learned what the kind of cold that ate into flesh like the bite of a wolf felt like.

She tucked her daughter into bed, pressing a butterfly’s kiss into Idril’s cheek, and whispering love into her darling’s ear. She rose and turned to kneel at Glorfindel’s bed. He was too old for kisses goodnight by the usual measure of ages, but her instincts brought her back to his bedside every night. There was something young and wounded in his sorrowful mouth and yearning eyes.

With the touch of an eternal mother, Elenwë caressed his cheek. He startled at the touch. Even after all these months under her care, he still shot her a confused and achingly vulnerable look, unaccustomed to such a simple caress. It broke Elenwë’s heart, even as it hardened it against the one he called mother –once. Elenwë was his mother now.

It was not proper for a _poicindis_ to indulge in anger. They were trained to speak courteously to their husbands and keep their eyes on the ground. But when it came to the mistreatment of children, all the belts holding them like delicate, bowing flowers, snapped. It was good Irimë was not there with them in the tent or Elenwë might have torn her eyes out.

“I wish you could let me in.” She stroked the hair back from his brow, and his skin tilted into the touch. She fussed with his blanket, giving into her mothering instincts in an attempt to bank the rage pointing like an arrow at Irimë’s shriveled heart. “You are almost a man, now. But I would love you as a mother, if you would let me.”

His eyes slid away, “You do not know me. You see a child who has been…hurt, and you want to care for me, but…my mother had her reasons for her treatment of me.”

Elenwë’s heart roared with violence against _that woman_. “No, my dear. There is nothing, no reason good enough, for what she did to you. _Nothing_.”

His mouth twisted in the kin of a grimace. “You do not know what I am. I can mope and pine all I like, wishing my mother had loved me, but in the end I am what I am, and other mothers have done worse to such as I.”

“And what are you?” Elenwë kept her gaze steady and tender upon this dear one’s face.

He said nothing, staring at the tent’s ceiling for a long moment. Then his eyes snapped to hers, and they burned with something wild and drenched in agony, but defiant in their despair. “I am one who dreams of men.”

Elenwë held his eyes, and with soft fingers touched the side of his face, all that blazing beauty and pain without bottom. “It would honor me, Glorfindel who dreams of men, if you would call me mother.”

The breath whooshed out of his lungs like a blow. He sucked in another, the sound desperate in the silence of the tent. His body shook beneath the blanket, eyes too bright to hold anything but tears. “Yes,” he gasped. “Yes. I would like that, Lady Elenwë.”

She smiled and kissed away the first tear. “Mother now, my son.”

He struggled for a smile through the tears. It trembled upon his mouth, too hesitant, too careful. But he said, “Mother,” like a prayer, and she kissed love into his cheek. This was their beginning. She would teach him what it was to look into a mirror and see the young man her own eyes saw. 

Elenwë held her son in her arms now as they faced down the monster he had once called mother. Glorfindel could not see the beauty he was, inside and out, not yet. But he would, one day, her son would meet his own eyes and see something worthy of pride and love staring back. 

She bent and kissed his cheek. The soft skin trembled like a virgin’s in the arms of her lover, like it had never known a kiss of affection in its life. 

Irimë came to a stop before them. She ought not to be here. Fingolfin had forbidden her any further contact with Glorfindel. Even the supervised ones she had been permitted when Glorfindel had first come under Turgon’s protection had been terminated. Fingolfin ignored Irimë’s every request –demand—to see her son.

Irimë stared at Glorfindel a long moment. Elenwë held him close. Her arms had to stretch to reach about the broadening of his shoulders, but she pressed him to her breast all the same. 

He was a child. This woman had crippled his growth, scaring him as surely as a knife to the skin. He may wear the form of a young man approaching his majority, but his heart was a boy’s heart, hungry for love.

Irimë’s eyes did not drop from his. She held his gaze as if she had a right to it. In her hand lay a scarf. “You dropped this. You will catch cold if you do not bundle up.”

“I was _fine_.” He tilted his head defiantly up at her. No vulnerability to lie at this woman’s feet for her to pick up and twist. Not anymore. He had Elenwë; he didn’t need Irimë to love him. He had a new mother.

Irimë mouth pinched. “I will be the judge of that.” She stepped towards him, arm lifting to loop the scarf about his neck, but he jerked away, a look locked between resentment and loathing on his face as he glared at her.

Frustration bent Irimë’s brows and nestled in the pinch of her mouth. “Fine,” she snapped, “I have made allowances for your—”

“That. Is. Enough.” Elenwë’s voice crashed through the howling wind like a battering-ram, and snapped Irimë’s mouth shut. Eyes that had slid over her with dismissal, now widened. “You have no right to speak to him.”

Irimë’s head flung up, high with pride. “No right? I carried him in my womb! I nursed him at my breast! I brought him into this world! Who has more right than me?”

“I do.”

“You?” Irimë’s lip curled. “And who are you but a weak-eyed, cotton-limbed—”

“I am his mother.” Elenwë’s arm tightened about Glorfindel’s shoulders, other arm curled around Idril’s slender ones. “Now get yourself gone from us before I call our king to throw you hence!” 

Irimë’s mouth parted like a snake’s, a hiss on her tongue, but she clamped it back. Her lips compressed into a line as white and unforgiving as the ice under their feet. She spun about, hair flinging out behind her, and stalked off with all the sulk of a princess denied her way.

Elenwë held Glorfindel and Idril close until the foul woman’s back had disappeared. She soaked in their bodies leaning against hers seeking safe haven in her arms like bread, like the rejuvenating warmth of a fire.

It was for children like Glorfindel and Idril, and Guilin with his hand laced in the back of Fingolfin’s belt, walking in his shadow, that she had been born. She was a _poicindis_ , and her duty was to these children, and the hundreds of other little ones slowing dying in this wasteland. She would not fail in her task of protection. She could not afford too.


	22. Chapter 19

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 19

Elenwë’s head tilted back, her sea of curls pillowed against his shoulder as her face drank in Laurelin’s kiss. Her lips parted on a soft sigh, golden lashes dusting her cheeks. “Do you think we can stay like this forever, Turgon? Just stay here, in this moment, our soles putting down roots in the grass, arms lifted up to the light, hands twinned together like tree branches, this peace captured forever in our hearts. I think I would like that.”

Turgon’s thumb traced the curve of her jaw. Her skin slid under his, silky and rich enough to burn envy into amber’s heart. “I would lie here with you until the world died, my star.”

Elenwë rolled into him, body molding to his with the perfection of one who had been made to sink into his side. Her fingers, delicate and slender, pushed his falling hair behind the tip of his ear, touch lingering upon it. “When you asked me to be your wife, you first named me thus, calling me the light of your life.”

“You are.” He took her free hand in his. Her fingers curled softly about his as he raised them to his lips. “I am lost in the darkness without you.”

Her fingers slipped down from his lips to rest lightly upon his jaw. “If I am the light, than you are the night sky in which I anchor and take my rest.”

Boots crunched over the ice behind him, Finrod too exhausted to bother with soundless footfalls. Turgon’s eyes focused, yanked from the refuge of his mind. He turned to face his friend.

“Turgon,” Finrod’s voice was ground down to the bone, yet still notes of a lilting melody struggled through. His smile was worn about the edges, but it was there. “I came. What is so important it could not wait until morning?” 

Morning. They still named it thus, as if there was anything to distinguish it from every other hour in this hell. Morning, they named it, giving it the illusion of hope. 

Turgon’s shoulder curved away from Finrod, searching for the words to name his desire, no, his need. A land gleaming sharp and pitiless as a wolf’s fangs ravaged his gaze. There was no escape from the sheets of ice rolling down in the south to fall in sheer cliffs to the sea, and jutting up in the north in claws of rock and ice stabbing the sky. 

The strange lights of this Northern sky danced in the cloudless sky. The lights reminded him of his childhood, when Finrod and he would spend a summer afternoon lazing about the beach and taking dips in the sea. The shifting greens of the Northern sky was the green the ocean turned when seen from below, hues shifting as the Tree Light played upon its surface. 

Elenwë had gasped the first night the lights appeared in the sky. She said they reminded her of the tales of a soul’s light passed down from Cuiviénen where the color of an Elven-soul was not purposefully forgotten, or never known to begin with (until Alqualondë). She had turned to Turgon, grasping his hand and smiling though her body must ache from the miles they’d dredged. She said it was as if the dead kept watch over them from the sky.

“Turgon? Turgon!”

Turgon blinked, mind pulling away from the memory. How easy, how tempting it was to lose himself in the memories, but he did not deserve their comfort. He had killed her, his star; he had killed her as surely as the Fëanorions. She had followed him into death. She had followed _him_.

He could not let himself ever stop feeling the pain. He could not move on, even for a moment, because he didn’t deserve to.

He turned back to Finrod. His cousin had drawn close, hand finding its way to Turgon’s shoulder sometime during Turgon’s drifting thoughts. Turgon did not deserve the comfort of the memories, but some days it was nearly impossible to keep his mind in the present.

He met Finrod’s concerned eyes. “I asked you to meet me here because I need a favor.”

Finrod squeezed his shoulder, “Tell me what you need, and I will do it. I promise.”

“You promise? Your word, whatever it is I ask, you will give it to me?” Turgon latched onto his cousin’s foolish promise. He would hold Finrod to it.

Finrod hesitated, searching Turgon’s face. Turgon gave the eyes what he’d given everyone: a face cool and remote as marble. Sometimes the mask broke, but he was very good at pretending his world had not ended the day Elenwë died. He needed to pretend, because only pretending shut up all the voices telling him he had some future waiting for him, some reason to go on living. 

There was no future. There was no getting passed this. Nothing awaited him on this white nightmare’s other side. Nothing. 

But he didn’t allow the grief to slay him. He didn’t kill himself for the same reason he sought the pain out if it started to slip away, for even the span of a breath: he didn’t deserve the release of death.

Finrod’s voice pulled him back again to his cousin’s anxious face, and the weight of his hand upon his shoulder. Its warmth felt very far away. “Yes. I promise. Whatever you need, Turgon, I will give it to you.”

Turgon held Finrod’s eyes, and didn’t bother with crouching his need in fair words, “I need you to drown me.”

“Wh—what?” Finrod’s hand dropped off his shoulder, shock painted stark as blood across his face.

“I am not asking you to kill me. But I want you to hold my head under water until I stop fighting, until I pass out. It won’t kill me,” he carried on as Finrod backed up, mouth a gash of horror. “You promised, Finrod. I _need_ this. Please.”

Finrod’s retreat halted, but his face had lost none of its horror. “Why?” Helplessness and sorrow stabbed into the word. “Why do you want….?”

“Because that is how she died. I need to feel it, feel what it was like.” It was his punishment, and it would bring him closer to her. He would know the terror she had felt in those last moments of life when he had not come to save her.

“I cannot. I cannot do this,” Finrod shook his head, holding his hands palm up, beseeching. 

“You gave me your word, Finrod.” Finrod would never break his word. It was dearer to him than happiness. 

“No, Turgon,” Finrod’s breath pulled ragged through his teeth, face washed white. “Do not ask this of me. I will not… I will never be able to…I am sorry Elenwë died, I am so sorry, but this is not the way. She would not have wanted you to do this to yourself—”

Turgon’s hand sliced through the air, cutting off Finrod’s words like a knife plunging into Finrod’s chest. “You promised me you would do anything I asked, and this is what I ask.” His voice softened at the anguish in Finrod’s eyes, for the sake of their friendship, “This will help me, Finrod, I know it will. You are helping me.”

Finrod covered his mouth with his hand, turning away. Turgon gave Finrod a moment to collect himself. He retreated to the brake in the ice he’d discovered that opened up a few paces of the river flowing under it. Finrod’s breath caught in a choke behind him as Turgon removed his heavy fur cloak and began pulling off his layers of tunics underneath.

Finrod’s boots fell heavy with hesitation behind him, as if Finrod dragged the weight of a dead body. Turgon dropped to his knees in the ice, and rested his hands on the river bank. His skin screamed for the warmth of his shed gloves. He embraced the pain.

Finrod came to a stop behind him. Turgon did not want to look back at his cousin’s face. This act would break their friendship. Finrod would never be able to forgive himself, or Turgon. Finrod would struggle to put it behind him, to let it go and forgive Turgon for forcing him into this, but it would lie between them forever. That was the price Turgon would pay. Elenwë had suffered far worse than a broken friendship. She had died alone, in terror, as the icy water ate her skin and her lungs burst in agony.

Turgon lowered to his belly, the thin cotton of his undershirt doing nothing to protect from the cold. His body shook with it, but the cold would not kill him if the grief could not.

“Turgon—” Finrod’s voice broke behind him. Turgon could hear the tears in its wetness. “I…release me, please, I cannot….do not force me. This is not me. It is not—”

“I do not release you. You gave me your word, and I hold you to it.” Finrod’s breath stuttered out. “Do it properly the first time. It will be easier for you if we get this over quickly.”

“ _Damn you_.” Finrod’s knees punched into the ice with a crack. His hand fisted a knot of Turgon’s hair, and shoved his face into the water.

Turgon had not pulled in a breath before Finrod dunked him, and what little he had in his lungs came out with his cry at the shock of the cold. It would be better this way. 

It seemed to take a lifetime before the knives of cold slicing into his skin gave way to the agony of his lungs, and he began to thrash. Finrod’s hold slipped for a moment, whether because his heart failed him or his strength, it didn’t matter; he repositioned and forced Turgon’s head back under before Turgon managed to suck in anything but water.

He was drowning and it was as terrifying and painful as he’d imagined. But there was a beauty found in this moment too. All the grief, all the months of agony washed away until there was only the fight to survive. And as he weakened, Elenwë drew closer to him. Only moments more and he could be reunited with her. She waited for him, turning, her smile warmer than Laurelin’s kiss, her arms held out to him lovelier than the stars. He reached for her, so close, so close… The fight seeped away, only the peace waiting for him inside her arms remained.

He woke coughing up water with Finrod kneeling beside him on the ice. Finrod rolled him over, and Turgon inhaled life in deep gulps of air so cold it burned his lungs on its way down. Finrod wordlessly draped Turgon’s heavy cloak over him, and dropped the pile of discarded tunics into the ice at his head.

Turgon’s hand shook as he shoved his dripping hair out of his eyes and looked up. Finrod stood over him, a sky dancing with light framed him and turned his pale hair an eerie green. His face wore no smile, only grimness rode his mouth, and a betrayal a step from weeping in his eyes.

Turgon held Finrod’s gaze, though it pressed into him with the weight of what he had done. He had used Finrod’s love for him ill, and manipulated one who would have died for him into acting out the violence of murder. “Thank you.”

Finrod’s jaw clenched. He turned away, feet striking the ice. “I trust you can find your own way back to camp.”

Turgon swallowed, hand sinking into the thick fur of his cloak’s collar. “Yes.” Finrod did not pause for another glance back.

Turgon sighed, rolling his hips into a seated position. With hands shaking from the cold, he knotted hair already turning to stings of ice at his nape, and began pulling on his tunics. 

Bundled up again, he stared up at the shifting lights and scrambled for the peace he’d found an inch from death, but it eluded him. He had promised Finrod this would help him, but he struggled to grasp hold of something as elusive as sea fog. It had brought him relief, but only for a moment. 

An existence without Elenwë in which he’d led her to her death still stretched out before him. There was no relief to be found in this life. Not even in punishment. Drowning as she had drowned had not lessened the horror of her death.

He abandoned his search for something he’d never find, and made his way back to camp. If he hurried, he could join Idril for an evening meal and kiss her goodnight.

No one tried to stop him as he drudged through the rows of tents. Most were too exhausted to rouse from their collapse on their beds, the rest would seek Fingon or Fingolfin out with their needs, fears, and miseries. There was a time Turgon had helped his father bear the weight of their people, but that was before Elenwë’s death. Now, his face could have been carved from stone, noble and fair as was his father’s, but removed. In Tirion he could bend his ear to other’s needs, and during their long march North his heart had been stirred with compassion, but now his heart had been removed from his chest, and what love he had left to give belonged to Idril and Aredhel. 

A voice he was not in a mood to endure hailed him. He did not stop, but Fingon’s jogging stride pulled alongside him. “Have you seen Glorfindel, Turgon? He was supposed to meet with—”

“I left Idril in his care.” Turgon’s voice was wiped clean of emotion and warmth. He held himself back from lashing out. It helped that he wasn’t looking at Fingon, but keeping his gaze fixed firmly ahead.

“Are you headed there now? I will go with you—”

Turgon broke. He spun with a snarl, “Do not presume to find a welcome in my tent. My daughter will not be associating with Fëanorion bed toys.” 

Fingon’s eyes lit with rage. His temper had ever been easy to stir. He clamped down on the spiteful words flashing in his eyes, and snarled at Turgon before storming away. Good riddance. If this was supposed to be Fingon learning to control his temper, it was pathetic. 

Fingon was particularly slow on the uptake this time, and he had never been blessed with an agile mind. Perhaps Turgon would have taken the news of Fingon’s relationship with Maedhros Fëanorion in a more forgiving light if he had learned of it before Elenwë’s death, but that was unlikely. Maedhros had earned Turgon’s eternal loathing (jealousy) long ago in Tirion when he stole Fingon from him. To learn Fingon had been bedding the son of the Elf at whose door Elenwë’s death lay most heavily was unforgivable.

Turgon reached the circle of his family’s tents, and pushed the flap of his own aside. He found Idril and Glorfindel already sat down to a meager supper. His eyes slid passed them to land on the unexpected visitor to his tent. 

He mustered a thin slice of smile for his sister, “Aredhel, I did not know you intended to join us this evening.”

Aredhel’s mouth curved into a returning smile, hers full and free of grief’s clutching shadow. “I did not know it myself until the desire to visit my dear brother and favorite niece took me.”

She finished pouring heavily watered-down miruvor for Idril and Glorfindel, and handed back the cups with care lest the precious rejuvenator spill even a drop. Her eyes rose to his again as he stepped fully into the tent, sealing the flap behind him and the harsh winds out. “Come, join us. Idril set your place,” Aredhel waved at Turgon’s customary seat at what would have been a table had they not dumped all the furniture years back on the ice. 

“Of course.” He paused to kiss his daughter’s brow and greet Glorfindel with a nod before taking his seat on the furs. He was the picture of dignified prince, reserved in his affections, but noble of heart. Or so he took care to appear under causal observation.

Aredhel’s eyes narrowed as she inspected him. Her hand found its way to her hip. “Why is your hair wet, brother?”

Idril gasped, eyes flying wide. “The ice didn’t…didn’t break under you, did it, Father?”

Turgon laid his hand over his daughter’s trembling one, the terror of another parent’s death in her eyes, and shot Aredhel a chastising look for frightening Idril so. Aredhel raised a shoulder in answer, not the least regretful. Turgon sighed, and focused back on Idril. “No, Idril, it is nothing. I am fine.”

Idril’s eyes, so like her mother’s, searched his face, but Turgon kept his lips tilted up in a close-mouthed smile until the fear receded from those blue eyes. He gave his daughter’s hand a gentle squeeze, before pulling back. He was just picking up his cup when Aredhel settled herself on the furs directly opposite him in their little arrangement mirroring dinners passed at table in Tirion, minus the table.

“What are you doing?”

“Hmm?” Aredhel hummed around a slice of salted jerky her teeth sawed at. She tore a chunk off, and began chewing with exaggeration, using her teeth to the best advantage.

Turgon’s hand curled into a ball on his thigh. He struggled to maintain his façade, but could feel it unraveling. Aredhel was sitting in _her_ spot. “That is Elenwë’s place. I have asked you not to sit there. Please move next to Idril.”

Aredhel paused in her chewing. Her brow furrowed, and she said around a mouthful of meat, “That was months ago. You cannot seriously still be…” She made a vague gesture with her hand, swallowing. “Turgon, Elenwë has been dead for two years. Don’t you think, well...saving her a spot at table after all this time is not helping you move on and accept what comes next—” 

The fury ignited in his chest, rocketing through him with such power he could not see straight. He shot to his feet, plate spilling onto the furs. “There is no moving on! There is no next! There is nothing!” He shook, the rage loosening its blinding hold and showing him Idril’s huge eyes. His words echoed back at him, mocking all his pretences of control. “I…forgive me.” 

He spun, stumbling back the steps he’d come, reaching the entrance on legs turned numb, and pulled the flap aside. The freezing wind, pounding into his face, grounded him and sucked the last drops of anger away.

He started walking. He didn’t care where, anywhere that was away. He stopped when his legs finished putting distance between him and Idril’s (Elenwë’s) eyes. He found himself nowhere, somewhere. It was quiet, punishingly cold, and absent of people, and that was all he cared for.

The bright green of the sky had morphed into ribbons of rose and a green so pale it bled into blue. The ribbons of light forked out from the horizon, dashing two paths across the sky.

“Maybe this is the doorway to the Halls of the Dead, Turgon. And that is where Námo keeps them, up there behind the sky. I hope it is true.” Elenwë’s soft mouth lifted in a smile as her fingers slid between his, their eyes fixed on the lights. “It looks like a thousand thousand souls dancing.”

Turgon wrapped his arm about her slender shoulders. “Maybe they shine so bright because they do not wish us to fall into sorrow. They watch us, and want us to remember them with joy.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, and tilted a smile up at him. “I know you do not believe the lights are the souls of dead Elves. You need not pretend for my sake.”

Turgon kissed her lovely mouth. “I do not mind pretending for a moment. It is a beautiful thought.”

She tucked herself tighter against him, eyes reaching up to the lights again. “Yes, it is.”

“Turgon.”

Turgon jerked, mind plunged brutally back into his body with his father’s voice. He did not turn as Fingolfin covered the last feet between them, needing those precious few moments to arrange his face into coolness.

Fingolfin stopped at his shoulder. He did not speak for a moment, but cast his eyes up with Turgon to the heavens. “It is beautiful,” Fingolfin began softly. “But I would we had never laid eyes on the North’s glories to spare us its cruelties.”

Turgon crossed his arms, mouth firming into a thin line. He gave his father no comfort, nor even the barest of acknowledgments.

Fingolfin sighed, the sound weary as a mountain groaning under the weight of Ages. “Aredhel sent me to find you. She told me what happened.” His father granted him the small mercy of putting aside dances of words to cut to the heart of the matter. Turgon could not bear to draw this out.

Fingolfin’s eyes released the sky to seek Turgon’s, but Turgon kept his face pointed straight ahead. “Turgon,” Fingolfin dared to lay a hand on his upper arm. Turgon’s jaw clenched, but he did not shrink from his father’s touch like a child seeking to hide. “Aredhel’s words did not take me by surprise. I know you still grieve, deeply. I wish I could take this pain from you, but there is nothing I can I do to make it hurt any less. But please, Turgon, do not run from me. I love you, and I would share your pain if you would open—”

Turgon punched his father in the jaw, sending Fingolfin’s head snapping back, and silencing those words that made him want to tear out his father’s tongue. There was no control left as the anger and agony rose, so entwined he could not pick one out from the other. There had never been any real control, only a veil he had tried to pull over the brokenness of his own face, the emptiness of his eyes where his heart had once dwelt.

“Keep your _help,_ I do not want it! I will not be coming to you to _share my pain_. I want nothing from you.” He spun away.

His father’s hand latched onto the fur of his collar before he’d taken two steps. “Please, Turgon, you are in pain. Let me help you. Let me help my son. You have suffered enough, let me in now, let me in. I understand, I _know_ , how much it hurts—”

Turgon tried to twist out of Fingolfin’s hold, but Fingolfin would not let him go so easily. They grappled a moment, before he shoved his father off him. He righted his cloak with a jerk, eyes burning when they meet Fingolfin’s. “If you truly understood, you would know that there is no _end_ , there is no confessions upon a father’s shoulder that will ease my grief by even the smallest measure. You tell me you understand grief like mine? Why? Because you lost a father who’d never been there for you? What grieving did Finwë’s death pull from you? A few passing regrets? A handful of tears for the idea of him more than the person himself? I lost my _wife_ , the heart of my heart. _Never_ speak to me of this again.”

Fingolfin’s face had shut itself away into stillness. Turgon’s lip curled to see the smooth lines of his father’s face. It was the exact same expression Fingolfin had worn when Finwë’s death had been announced before the Ring of Doom. If his father had loved as Turgon had loved, he would have thrown back his head and screamed his anguish to the stars as Turgon had done when they held him back from driving into that river of ice and dying rather than let her died alone.

“I have known grief,” Fingolfin’s voice dropped soft between them, face breaking open to reveal a gleam of a grief as vast as an Age. “I know…I _know_.” His throat worked, words sticking. 

His father’s words were raw, like open wounds, his grief no lie. Fingolfin’s eyes searched for some sign that Turgon would surrender to him his heart, and return to being his son. But Turgon could never go back.

Turgon struck out from the core of his grief with an accusation he’d held back until this moment, “The Fëanorions burned the ships. But it was _you_ who took us into hell. You killed Elenwë, as surely as the Fëanorions did. So no, things will never be right between us again, and you can stop offering your ‘help’ because the words coming out of your mouth make me want to strike you.” He tore his eyes away from his father’s face. Fingolfin had led Elenwë to her death as surely as Turgon had, but some part of him must still love his father because his throat felt like hot metal was being poured down it at the look his words had stabbed into Fingolfin’s eyes.

Turgon hurried away before he had to hear the pain in his father’s voice calling him back. Fingolfin would not let him be, even after this, but at least Turgon had bought some small distance. The grief his father had bared to him had nearly been Turgon’s undoing. But he could not let the pain go. He clung to it, wrapping it about himself like an umbilical cord about a baby’s neck.

He could not keep running from Idril’s eyes, so wide and frightened. He deserved to see them shrinking from him. But when he entered his tent, he found Aredhel sitting under a pile of furs, waiting up for him, and Idril’s chest already rising and falling in sleep. Glorfindel’s golden waves spilled from the furs where he lay tucked under them, back to the tent entrance, at Idril’s side to share warmth.

Aredhel disentangled herself from the furs and stood. She put her back to him as she arranged them on the bed Turgon had made up for himself when they’d pitched tents. Turgon’s fingers curled into his palms, pinching his skin to keep himself under control. Elenwë had not liked the bear skin down first, and Aredhel had upset Elenwë’s pillow. He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. His sister was only trying to help.

He opened his eyes to find Aredhel had straightened and turned to him. She watched him a moment, eyes a play between shadows and a grey glimmering in the candlelight. He should be more grateful for her presence. She kept herself apart from their family, or at least her immediate family, choosing her friends and their cousins to spend her days with.

He left his haunt by the tent’s entrance to approach her. “Thank you,” he nodded at Idril.

Aredhel sighed, crossing the distance to stand directly before him. She spoke with the frankness of her nature, “I love you, brother, but do not look to me. I will never be here.” She stepped passed him without giving him a chance to respond, picking up her discarded cloak. “I am staying with friends of mine. I will see you again when I see you. Stay safe.”

“Aredhel—” She couldn’t leave, not yet. He didn’t want to do this alone. And there was no one else he could turn to without betraying Elenwë’s memory. 

“No, Turgon.” Aredhel threw her cloak over she shoulders, pinning it at her throat, and keeping her back to him. “I am not going to be anyone’s shoulder to lean on. I can’t—won’t. You know I am not…I know what you want of me. You want me to take Elenwë’s place as Idril’s mother.” 

She turned, and he did not hide the truth of her words from his face. Yes, he wanted that. He _needed_ that. “Do you want to know why I avoid you now as much as I avoid Father and Fingon? It is because every time you look at me I can feel you looking for a mother. I am never going to be a mother to her, Turgon. I am only ever going to be myself, and myself cannot give you want you seek.” 

Aredhel did not drop her eyes in shame or sorrow. He knew everything she spoke was the truth, but even knowing he had hoped. “I love Idril, but the care of her would be a burden, pulling me down. I feel so…so heavy, Turgon.” Her hand strayed to her breast, pressing into her heart. “I want free of this, this cloud over my heart, my mind that is always, _always_ , preying on me. I want to be _free_. No ties.”

Turgon struggled to suppress the despair her words, washing her hands of him, of them all, twisted inside him. “Is love not a tie? Would you cast that aside as well?”

Her breath blew through her nose in a long exhale, before she turned from him. “If you are seeking steadiness I would tell you to look no further than our father, but I know you will only turn to him after you have reached the last, bitter sip of your pride. So look to Glorfindel. He will look after Idril.” 

She paused as she pulled back the tent flap, and turned a look back over her shoulder at him. Her leaving came upon him like the sealing of a well’s cover, taking the last crack of light with it and leaving him utterly alone in the pit of the grief he gnawed upon like old bones. 

She looked away. “Good-bye, brother.” The flap fell back soundlessly behind her passage. 

Only after she was gone could his face wear the forlornness of his heart, only after could his pride allow the begging to rest naked in his eyes as he stared as one transfixed by at the tent’s entrance. He had no right to ask Aredhel to take the place of mother in Idril’s life, not he who knew his sister’s heart best, and knew just how much such a responsibility would burden and shackle her. But he had asked anyway because he needed her. 

It hadn’t mattered what he needed in the end. It never did.

He pressed the heels of his palms into his eyes, shoulders slumping. He snapped himself together when he heard the rustling of furs. He looked over to find Glorfindel watching him. 

Glorfindel licked his lips, leaving a trail of wetness that glimmered in the candlelight. “I was not asleep.”

Turgon turned away, crossing the rush mats to his bed (made up for two). “Anything you heard should not be repeated to Idril, do you understand?” He pinned Glorfindel with a look.

Glorfindel did not shy away from it. He was both the shyest young man Turgon had ever met, as well as one of the most fearless. “Yes. I was not planning to.”

“Good.” He turned down his furs, and removed his boots. When he set them aside, lined up at his bed’s feet, leaving room for the place Elenwë had settled hers, he considered Glorfindel again. “Aredhel spoke truly. You make a trustworthy companion for Idril.” 

He observed Glorfindel’s face as he began unbraiding his hair, tucking the loosened ties under Elenwë’s pillow. She liked his hair spread out on the pillow about them, falling in curtains as they made love, and all hers to braid every morning, sometimes beginning her work while he still slept in her arms.

“I want you to promise me to protect Idril. And if anything should happen to me, that you would watch over her, and care for her.”

Glorfindel’s face closed, like a flower shriveling up. “You are planning on leaving us –her. I have seen Elves die of grief before, and I heard what you said at table today.”

Turgon released the half-undone braid, and rose to his knees to scoot next to his sleeping daughter on the bed she and Glorfindel shared. He put his hand on Glorfindel’s shoulder. “No, I will not fade. But accidents happen in this harder world, and I want to know Idril will be taken care of if I am no longer here. So will you promise me?”

Glorfindel’s face carried the creases of seriousness so common on a face too young to have born anything but carefree smiles if this had yet been Tirion. But Glorfindel had not worn smiles often even in Tirion when the Light still turned the city’s white towers to spikes of pearl. “I promise. She is Elenwë’s daughter. I will never leave her.”

Turgon squeezed Glorfindel’s shoulder, before pulling his hand back and rising. “Thank you, Glorfindel. Your promise comforts me.” 

Glorfindel’s loyalty would be with Elenwë’s memory, but Turgon could use that for his daughter. He did not plan to died, and if he did, it would not be at his own hand, but securing Glorfindel’s promise and binding the young man tighter to his House and daughter may benefit Idril in the future. Glorfindel would not steer her wrong. 

If Glorfindel were not so close in blood, Turgon would be drawing up a betrothal contract. Keeping Idril safe and happy was his highest priority. Glorfindel would have made a fine husband, and at thirteen Idril was old enough to notice her cousin’s handsome face. Turgon had caught his daughter peeking glances at Glorfindel when the young man disrobed. If the danger of freezing were not so real, Turgon would have moved Glorfindel out of his daughter’s bed. But Glorfindel was too body-shy and honorable for anything of an inappropriate nature to be passing under the furs.

Turgon stretched out on his bed of furs, pulling the layers of skins up to his chin. He rolled onto his side, facing the empty spot beside him. He smoothed down Elenwë’s pillow, hand coming to rest on the place her heart would have beat. If he closed his eyes, he could still smell her scent lingering in the down. His body ached with the memory of hers curled into his, her delicate feet molded to his calf.

He opened his eyes on his star. She smiled, leaning over him where he lay in the grass. Her fingers traced consolations into the skin of his face. “I have been waiting for you, my night.”

“Forgive me. I hurried home to you as quickly as I could.”

Her mouth dropped to his, kissing him with her smile. She pulled back with a contented sigh. “Tell me more of what awaits us in the Free Lands.”

Turgon sat up and took her into his arms, pulling her against his chest. She rested her head in the crook of his neck, curls tickling his nose, and he painted their glorious future together with his words. He raised glimmering towers, and golden-roofed halls for her, build her a mansion and quiet garden flocked with swans. They planned the son they would have together with Turgon’s dark hair and grey eyes, and then twins as Elenwë slipped to the grass, giggling as their names and hair color became ever more outrageous. Turgon followed her down, laying his body over hers. He kissed her neck, her mouth, drinking in her laughter and spilling all his secret fears and self-doubts into her mouth, letting her carry away his night in the cradle of her star-arms.


	23. Chapter 20

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 20

Fingolfin’s fingertips rested against the black dots denoting Fëanor’s settlement. The scouts could not give an accurate account of its size, for Fingolfin had given the order not to approach or engage the Fëanorions in any way, but there was no doubt now that Fëanor lay less than a day’s ride south.

His pointer finger seemed to burn through the parchment and into his skin where he held Fëanor’s resting place under his fingertips. He trailed it up to the clusters of dots marking his own people’s encampment. The cartographers had sketched the path their people had traveled from the Helcaraxë to the gates of Morgoth’s fortress, and then along the curve of the mountains until they found a pass to cross west. 

The land Fëanor had chosen to plant his roots in was fenced by mountains, acting as a natural fortification. A more fertile land would have to be settled, but that could wait until after they’d tested Morgoth’s strength together. This country would not leave them starving in the meantime. Ancient glaciers had carved out a hundred smaller lakes and waterways, with Fëanor choosing the largest for his settlement. If the Noldor had proved anything, it was that they were a people capable of adapting. They would learn to fashion boats and fishing nets, and become as skilled at harvesting the lakes as they were at harvesting fields.

They would learn, and they would thrive, because they were again one people. Fëanor’s mind might yet be overthrown with madness, but Fingolfin was not the Fingolfin who had placed pride between them, and been so foolish as to stir the suspicions (hurt) in his brother’s eyes again and again because he could not let Fëanor _lead_. 

Everything was different now. Fingolfin remembered. He _remembered_.

A scratching at the tent’s flap brought his eyes up from the map. “Come.”  
His attendant poked his head in. “Prince Fingolfin, it is….” The man faltered. The title of king had been stripped from Fingolfin’s name by his own hand. But too late. Too late to undo what his pride had set in his brother’s eyes. Too late for Fëanor to trust him again. “It is the Fëanorions, my lord. It is Fëanor’s sons. They have come.”

Maedhros.

Fingolfin took a steadying breath, before pushing back his chair to stand and meet them. “Send them in, and then call Prince Fingon.”

“Yes, my lord,” the attendant nodded before popping out. Fingolfin busied himself rolling up the map and arranging his worn tunic that had seen too many years, as his attendant’s voice seeped through the tent wall, granting Fëanor’s sons the right of passage.

The flap pulled aside and Maglor stepped in. There was a very narrow strip of time, like that between the birth canal and first breath, as Celegorm and Curufin follow their brother in, that Fingolfin did not understand. Then the new day light heating up the tent’s sides and following the sons of Fëanor through the open flap, caught in gold. A shadow breathed over Fingolfin’s heart, stretching long, long long…

Maglor wore the crown. No.

No. No. No.

Darkness crept into his bones.

Fëanor.

How could…how could the world still be turning? How could the stars not have crashed into the earth? How could there be anything left without Fëanor’s eyes here to haunt him?

Maglor was speaking. Fingolfin could not rearrange the words in his head to make sense. The wind of a loss he could not speak of, could not scream his denial of, could not acknowledge for what it was in any way, howled in his ears.

He was stone, he was a pillar, he was a mountain side. Inside, the anguish had risen up to his neck, downing him, but outside he was the rock his people clung to. Everything was shut up inside the cage of his ribs. 

He felt like one of the bodies at Alqualondë, with all the blood on the wrong side of its skin, but he did not cry out with the pain of the hand plunged into his chest cavity, ripping his heart from his chest. His mouth did not tremble, his clenched jaw kept that back, and his hands fisted behind his back concealed the worst of the tremors.

Celegorm’s hand cupped the small of Maglor’s back, the touch subtle enough most would not know it for what it was: the only thing holding Maglor from crumbling to ash. Maglor’s eyes, Fëanor’s silver, were hollow as his voice stumbled over his brother’s name. Maedhros.

Fingolfin’s ribcage struggled up to breathe, but he cut his fingernails into the flesh of his palms deep enough to draw blood, and held himself together to take one more blow, though he had nothing else to give, no other hearts to tear out. He lay bruised and broken upon a mountain side where he had been cast down from the heaven where he’d dreamed of holding silver eyes and walking side-by-side with the only one he’d ever wanted.

Curufin picked up the tale of their brother’s fate, voice barren as rock. There was no question of why Curufin had been chosen to accompany his brother and king into Fingolfin’s camp, any more than there was of why Maglor had wore the crown and mantled himself like a prince. If one did not look too closely into Curufin’s face and see all the places the fire had died to be re-made in ice, they could see all the places Curufin ended and Fëanor began.

After Curufin had finished speaking in that horrifyingly clinical voice of his brother’s capture and most likely death, Maglor’s voice found itself again to speak of the war, of the _future_ of the Noldor. 

Fingolfin had seen Maglor’s voice bring Elves to their knees, throw down the walls of the stoniest heart, and bring tears to eyes that had not known their cleaning wash for decades. He’d seen Elves rally to the banner Malgor’s voice unfurled inside their eyes, and sworn rivals clasp hands as they were moved together. When Maglor sang, Fingolfin felt like the whole sky were inside him, filling him up. But the voice coming out of Maglor’s mouth now, speaking of the future, was threadbare, a tapestry unraveling and leaving nothing but a pile of what had once been beauty.

Fingolfin could not remember Maglor’s words after, the conversation washed through him, drowned out as he was drowning. Only the sound of Maglor’s voice lingered.

Fingon, pulling aside the tent’s flap and stepping in with eyes shining like they’d been kissed by a sunrise, broke Malgor’s voice in two. Fingolfin could not look into his son’s eyes as they searched the gathered faces for his husband’s, but he did because he had to. The light inside Fingon’s eyes did not go out the moment they landed on the crown.

His head cantered to the side, face so full of confusion Fingolfin wanted to rip the world apart. If he could stand between Fingon and the hand reaching out, claws flexed, to snatch his son’s heart, he would. “Where is Maedhros?”

No one answered for a long moment stretching passed breaking and into the point where dead things slither. But still, _still_ , Fingon’s eyes did not shed their expectant light.

“Fingon…” Maglor could speak no more, only shake his head, eyes saying everything.

Fingon’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again. “You are saying..? But where is he?”

Curufin’s voice sliced without mercy, without cruelty, without anything, “Our brother is dead.”

“No. Maedhros is not dead.” Fingon spoke with absolute certainty, jaw curved with the stubbornness of indestructible belief. “He is not dead. I can feel him –even now—he is not dead.”

Maglor’s breath whooshed out of him. He swayed, almost stumbling to his knees, but Celegorm’s arms caught him. Even Curufin’s face flickered, lips parting to reveal a set of teeth loosening their desperate clasp for just a moment.

“He is not dead,” Fingon delivered the news softly this time. “So where is he? Where is my husband?”

“He was taken,” Celegorm ground the words out like he wanted to murder them, “Morgoth captured him.”

“Cap—” Fingon took a step back, the light fading from his eyes, slaughtered by the horror. “How? When? Where _is he_?”

Fingolfin moved and caught his son in his arms. Fingon did not melt into the embrace, but he did not push his father off him. Fingon kept his burning gaze on the Fëanorions, body held straight and demanding.

Curufin’s lip curled. “Surely you know, since you are his _husband_. You must have felt the moment he was captured, and every year Morgoth has had him for his every whim since. Unless your bond with my brother runs shallower than you would like to believe.”

Fingon barred his teeth, “You know _nothing_ about—” 

Fingolfin’s fingers curled around his son’s arms, squeezing a warning. His gaze slid cool over the line of Fingon’s shoulder to the Fëanorions. “If you would leave us, nephews. Fingon and I wish to be alone.”

“What? No. I haven’t finished with them.” Fingon shrugged his father’s arms off, taking an aggressive step towards his cousins.

“We will speak of this again in the future. For now they should return to their encampment.”

Curufin’s head tilted up, haughty and as untouchable as the lines of Fëanor’s face. “ _You_ would order my brother, the king of the Noldor thus, _Prince_ Fingolfin.”

Maglor pulled his spine straight like a king’s, but laid a restraining hand on Curufin’s wrist. “We will go.” He met Fingolfin’s eyes, and Fingolfin took them like a blow. The hollowness of Maglor’s heart had been veiled, leaving only the king behind. His eyes were the exact same color as his father’s. “We shall speak again, Fingolfin.”

Maglor led his brothers from the tent with crowned head held high, and cloak sweeping out behind him, but as he passed Fingon his eyes could not look away or conceal their desperate hunger. But now was not the time to pick Fingon’s bond with Maedhros down to the bone and discover its every fluctuation over the years since Maehdros’ capture.

Fingon snapped around to face Fingolfin, nostrils flared like a buck pawing the earth. “How could you just let them go? I need to know everything that happened! I need to find Maedhros—”

“Fingon, no, listen.” Fingolfin grabbed at his son’s hands, and Fingon let himself be caught, though his eyes lost none of their fire. His son’s hands lay twitching and hot in his, calloused palms pressed to calloused palms. 

Fingolfin needed to slow this burning or he would lose his son, this day, this very hour. “Tell me about your bond. You feel Maedhros still lives, can you feel anything else? Can you reach his thoughts?”

Fingon’s fingers tightened about his, and his teeth clenched. “No. Maedhros…he closed it. The bond. Years ago. I thought….it was when I was still…still trying to hate him, and I thought, at the time, that he was running away from what he had done, or making our separation easier to bear. But what if all this time, all this time he has been in pain and protecting me from it? All these years he has needed me and I was not—” Fingon tore his hands away, covering his eyes, his face, from his father. His shoulders shook, but his breathing betrayed no sobs.

“Fingon—” He closed the distance Fingon had tried to raise between them, easing his son’s hands back. 

A tear curved a path down Fingon’s cheek. “He needed me and I was not there.”

He took his son’s shoulders in his hands, running their strong line from ball to collar. “Listen to me. I promise you we will gather our leaders together, even work with the Fëanorions, and we _will_ come up with a plan to rescue Maedhros.” 

Maedhros would be killed before they reached him. If they brought him home it would only be as a body, but Fingon _needed_ hope and the purpose of a rescue. Fingolfin would have given his life for Maedhros,’ but that was not how the world worked. He could not bring Maedhros home to Fingon’s arms. He could only delay Fingon’s despair when he finally understood that Maedhros was gone, and if he could, save his son from following after Maedhros, getting himself killed in a doomed rescue attempt.

Fingon’s hands came up to grasp Fingolfin’s wrists, squeezing, eyes desperate and searching on his father’s face. “You promise?”

Fingolfin’s mouth trembled, hand slipping around to cradle the back of his son’s head and pull him close. Fingon let himself be held as Turgon had not since Elenwë’s death. Fingolfin needed his arms around Fingon and Fingon’s arms holding him back as much as Fingon did. 

He buried his nose in his son’s hair. “I promise. Just promise me –promise me—you will not do anything reckless.” (Promise me you will not ride off on a mission of love and doom and get yourself killed).

Fingon’s hands fisted in Fingolfin’s tunic. “I promise.”

When Fingon left him, Fingolfin was able to let him go, certain now that he would still have his son by the time the new light slipped beyond the western horizon.

He put his tent in order, and told his attendant he would be going for a walk (using the excuse of discovering this new land for himself as kings did not run away to cry). As he walked through the encampment, he kept a smile in his pocket, ready to slip on, and his steps the strong ones suited for the leader who had carried them through hell. He walked until the last row of tents had passed behind a knoll in the land, and then walked on.

Wildflowers blanketed these low lands, painting curves around the nearest lake’s shore. The mountains circled white-topped in the east, and across the immense blue of the sky rode clouds that looked like a child’s fingers had smeared them in. The world bloomed around him, but Fingolfin felt more despair in that hour than any passed upon the sharpened blade of the world, the Helcaraxë. He looked upon the beauty of the world and saw only a veil pulled over the grinning mouth of a hyena picking them all, one by one, every last piece of beauty of _fire_ , down to its bones.

His feet took him to the lake’s shore. He found a spot where the grass rolled gently into the water’s arms, leaving a trail of beach for the water to lap its tongue against. The lake shone a clear, tossing blue under the rays of the new light.

He peeled off his tunic first. The memory of Laurelin had reached its zenith, and the pleasant air of Endor’s first spring greeting him. His boots, undershirt, and leggings came next until he stood naked upon the shore. 

He waded out to his calves, and stood for a moment, toes sinking into the soft sand of the lake bottom. Little fishes rubbed against his legs like curious children. He closed his eyes and saw another pair of eyes eclipsing the stars looking back. He tasted breath like flame, blazing between them, so close, always so close, but never close enough to mean something. He traced Fëanor’s face behind his eyelids, divinity shut up inside his skull.

It was not enough. 

It was not enough to remember. Remembering would not bring Fëanor back. Remembering would not ease this terrible anguish pressing like a giant’s fist encircling his heart, grinding his ribs together until every breath pained him as he pulled air through collapsing lungs.

His legs knifed through the water, sending it splashing out until he’d buried his hips, his chest, inside it. He went down, springing off the lake’s bottom, sending his body curving up before plunging back in, going deep, deeper, until he could feel the water’s weight upon him like he could feel the grief.

He opened his eyes on a world a deepest green and _screamed_. He thrashed, fighting the water, fighting a Song sung before time began, fighting fate and destiny and doom, fighting against a life without _him_ in it, and a god of death to _give him back_.

He screamed and stirred the water white as he impaled himself on grief, wrestling it, wrestling a truth that could not, _could not_ , be true. Fëanor could not be dead.

But he was. And Maedhros as good as.

He dragged the carnage of himself from the water, crawling across the beach, unable to muster the will to rise and walk like a prince, like the king his pride had allowed them to falsely christen him. His hair gathered sand behind him, a tangled mass that had once known the touch of Fëanor’s fingers. His skin shivered in a breeze that no longer carried the scent of wildflowers and the memory of Laurelin’s kiss. He curled up like a child in its mother’s womb, knees to chest. 

He stared at nothing in this world, this time. His eyes watched the eyes of a star, the smile of fire, a voice, deep and enchanting as the sea’s, rising in excitement as hands picked up words and shaped them before Fingolfin’s eager child-eyes. And Fëanor watching him back, soaking in his smile, his laugh, because he _meant_ something to those eyes he’d believed for years would only ever be looking away.

His watched Laurelin’s light catch in a mane of copper rippling like a ocean’s waves down Maedhros’ back, those silver eyes locked on Fingon as Fingon’s mouth ate up a smile, laughing like the world was made of joy. Those silver eyes turned to Fingolfin to share a smirk over a dinner table circled with haughty lords Maehdros and he laughed out in the curves of a single secret smile.

The sobs crashed over him, titanic as gods colliding. He stuffed his fist into his mouth to muffled them and use the pain of his teeth to fight against their taking hold. Even now, alone on a lakeshore with none but the beasts to hear, he could not let his heart be heard. Too many years hiding it all down so deep no one could pull its vulnerable truth from his lips.

But this grief could not be contained in a fist. He rocked under it, but that could not contain it either and he writhed, hands clawing into the sand, muscles locking up (keep it in, keep it in), only to lash out at the earth again. 

His mouth opened on a scream, and he buried his face in the sand to muffle the agony tearing from his throat. Only one word, falling like blood from his lips: “Fëanor!”

Sand in his mouth, his eyes, his fists, his body rebelling, his skeleton shivering, heart giving out, surrendering. The grief won, and the sobs took him in their fist like a doll in a giant’s maw and shook him. He wept until the anguish could no longer be eased with tears and only the empty places remained.

He opened his eyes on a sky flaming brilliance as the new light went down in the west. Into his skin, far, far under, he retreated. And there he would remain, this grief that served no purpose and brought no one back to life would be caged there and left with only himself to know. He would stand up, pull on his clothes, and walk back to the son who needed him, the son who didn’t want him, the daughter who only wanted to be free of him, the grandson he’d failed to protect, and the nephew he’d turned his blind eyes upon while atrocities were carved into his soul. He’d return to a people he loved, but who would not understand or accept the mourning in his heart for the king who had abandoned them (as kings would do to those harboring treason in their hearts), and the son who had followed.

*

Celegorm was easy to write off, even easier than Caranthir, because at least Caranthir didn’t trail in one of his brother’s shadow. Maybe Celegorm should have been offended by how often he’d been mistaken for the brainless brawn of the family, but it wasn’t so far from the truth, and even if it wasn’t entirely true it was better to be underestimated in a fight.

He enjoyed spending his time among the wilder things of life, working up a sweat in a wrestling match, tracking a doe through the woods with nothing but his wits to guide him, and he’d settled more than a few arguments with his fists. He lived in the present, and saw little value in spending his days musing upon some ‘higher’ plane. 

Now Maglor, he possessed a poet’s soul, and it served him not at all this side of the sea. His idealist spirit would be the ruin of him; if it hadn’t already. Maglor kept hoping and searching for _some way_ this would all turn out all right. 

Celegorm never strayed far from his elder brother’s side these days. He would have trusted Maedhros with Maglor’s protection and sanity, but Maedhros was gone, for all they knew, dead. And he wasn’t going to think about that. 

Between his teeth he clenched the pale hope of the dawn’s rising, and would hold on with snarls and bloodied fist as long as it took to survive the holes Maedhros and Father had left in their lives. Never get passed, there was no getting passed this, no getting over it, just surviving. And they would keep surviving until the last son of Fëanor fell. They owned it to their father, to Maedhros, to avenge them and steal back what was stolen. Until Morgoth was a pile of shit and blood and tears and burnt, crisped flesh beneath their boots, they would never call it enough. For Father, for Maedhros, they lived.

Maglor had held up remarkably well those first few years of kingship; he still had hope for…who knew what? Maybe he’d convinced himself Maedhros was alive (or maybe he’d convinced himself Maedhros was dead and passed beyond suffering). It wasn’t logic or absolution sustaining the hope. They’d had no choice; Morgoth was a liar, but good luck getting their hearts to believe that.

Maglor’s optimism had run out some time ago, and left only the crushing weight of grief and guilt behind. Still he’d struggled on; the blood of Fëanor were fighters. But everything had been made ten times harder now tensions pulled dangerously tight between their camp and the newly arrived host of Fingolfin.

(A flash of white, her dress snapping about her feet as the flowers bloomed beneath them. Black –the fall of her hair which he still remembered like twilight between his fingertips. Grey – the fearless color of her eyes. He slammed the door on those thoughts. Fuck Aredhel Ar-Feiniel. Fuck her to hell and back, the conniving, faithless bitch.)

Of course Celegorm thought Fingolfin’s people valiant and possessing of an unforeseen resilience in their pursuit of vengeance –against not only Morgoth, but Fëanor. To cross the Helcaraxë, yes, they were a valiant people, but that hardly meant the Fëanorions had to roll over and show them their bellies like cowed dogs. If there hadn’t been so much grumbling against his father after Finarfin’s abandonment, then Fëanor never would have had cut them loose like so much extra baggage.

Maglor danced politics with Fingolfin and his lords with a subtly that would have made Maedhros proud. He held the resolve that kept him off his knees before Fingolfin, and kept him pushing the Fëanorions’ needs first and foremost, even in the face of the Helcaraxë’s ravaging, balanced with the words of regret Fingolfin and his people needed to hear. 

But Maglor lacked the will to rule. When the tent flaps fell, cutting off the _need_ for shows of strength for the sake of political games and their people’s morale, Maglor was left without the energy to complete the circlet of kingship. The unanswered missives, requests for this and that, and judgments to pass, built up. The hope had blow out in Maglor’s chest, and the point of it all with it. He could not find the strength to fight on alone.

He did not stand alone though. If Celegorm were the only brother standing at Maglor’s side, he’d have ended up burning the scrolls and scrolls of inventory, censuses, and ledgers if they’d been piled on his plate. Caranthir was much more suited to such work. 

In some ways Caranthir would have been the best choice for king out of the lot of them –now Maedhros was gone, for none, not even Maedhros’ opponents, could deny he had been a magnificent leader. But Caranthir could have only been a king if he wasn’t required to make public speeches, or allowed to make hasty decisions in anger, or really have to speak with anyone of lower intellects at all. So then again, maybe Caranthir wasn’t a viable choice either. 

Celegorm had faith that with himself at Maglor’s back as a shield, and Caranthir’s ink-stained fingers picking over the fine details in the background, and Curufin handling the technical advancements needed to win this war, they would get by. Under Maglor’s leadership it had become a family affair, this kingship. And yet, even though they would endure, Celegorm didn’t pretend for even a moment that they all didn’t feel the ghosts of Fëanor and Maedhros slipping into the gaps of their smiles, the too-long pauses in conversation, the deep hours of night fighting fighting fighting against the memories of better times, knowing they would break if they allowed themselves to remember all that had been stripped from them like the proud wings of grounded, broken hawks. 

*

Fingolfin found him in the stables, strapping his bow on the saddle. Fingon didn’t look up as he tightened the strap. He couldn’t look into his father’s eyes when his father begged him to stay.

“I have to do this, Father. I love him. I have tried…” He’d tried to obliterate Maedhros from his heart, but in the end, all he wanted was to hear Maehdros whisper in his ear one more time: you are mine and I am yours. “I tried to forget him, you know how hard I tried, but I can’t. And I am not going to _sit here_ when he needs me to bring him home.”

“The chances of your survival are miniscule. You witnessed the height of Angband’s walls, the breadth of its gate. It is unassailable without an army of…” His father couldn’t force anymore words out. 

His father had tried to make his voice steady, persuasive with the cool logic his father pretend to employ in all things. But Fingon knew his father, knew him now better than he’d ever known him in Tirion, and his father was as reckless as him and as passionate as a Fëanorion under that mask of control.

“If it was your love, your husband, brother, the breath in your lungs, you would do the same. I have to do this, Father. If I don’t…if I don’t I may live for a thousand more years, but the person living that life won’t be me anymore.” 

He’d buried his heart in the heart of a man with a smile like the mother of beauty, and he didn’t want it back again.

“You could die.”

Fingon dropped his forehead into the horse’s shoulder. The helplessness, the agony wrapped up in those words falling from his father’s mouth took his heart in a vice grip and strangled it. 

Hands on his shoulders turned him. “Let me hold you.” Fingon fell into his father’s arms. His father kissed his brow, his cheeks, and Fingon tasted the salt of his father’s tears on his lips. “Come back to me, just come back. Please, Fingon, please.”

“I will try, Father.”

His father held him for a long moment more, clinging, arms unable to let Fingon go. But Fingon pulled back eventually. They whispered their love as they pressed brow-to-brow, before Fingolfin finally found the power to let Fingon go. 

His father passed his harp into his hands; he must have fetched it from Fingon’s room. “Don’t overlook any power in your veins. You walk into the shadow of not only evil, but a fortress built upon the ancient bones of Power.”

“I have little skill with Song of Power, Father.” 

“But you have _some_ skill, and we must wield the light of the stars born into our blood as best we may, and songs are one of our greatest weapons to do so. Do not walk into the nest of Darkness without your light held fast in your fist.”

Fingon accepted the harp, pulling the strap over his head to rest against his back. His eyes rose to his father’s, determined and bright. He would bring Maedhros home. He would have walked through death and oceans for Maedhros; he could pull him from the claws of a Dark God.

When the moment of Fingon’s swinging into the saddle came, Fingolfin tried to pull him back into his arms. Fingon let himself be pulled one last time, but his father wouldn’t let him go. 

“Father, I have to.” His arms gently attempted to untangle himself from his father.

Fingolfin buried his hands in Fingon’s tunic, holding on. “Please, just…please. I cannot.”

Fingon’s cheeks swam with tears, as his father shook against him, weeping openly as Fingon had never seen him weep, not his father who stood strong and powerful as a mountaintop. “You have to let me go, Father.”

Fingolfin clung harder. 

“Father.” Fingon’s hands found his father’s wet face, cupping it like his father had cupped his so many times. Fingolfin’s mouth trembled, eyes breaking, but slowly, he released Fingon.

“I cannot…I cannot watch.” He took a step back, eyes memorizing Fingon’s face, every line, every angle. With an effort that stole a fresh sob from his chest, Fingolfin wretched his eyes away. 

He stumbled to the paddock’s fence, shaking hands coming out to fist the railing until splinters sliced under his nails, and his knuckles jutted so sharp and white against his skin they could have been naked bones.

Fingon couldn’t linger and draw out the agony of this moment. He swung into the saddle, and with one last look back at the ridged, shaking line of his father’s back, he rode hard North. He swore he’d walk into hell and bring them both out alive, for Maedhros and for his father.

*

He felt it all. The knife slicing through flesh, tendon, bone, severing the hand that had been nothing but a numb block, as much a prison as Thangorodrim’s sheer walls. He’d been aware and sobbing as the eagle brought him back to the light, face pressed against Fingon’s tunic, curled like a broken doll in Fingon’s shaking arms. 

It seemed like an elaborate hallucination at the time. How many times had he dreamt this moment? How many times had he forced himself to remember the exact flavor of Fingon’s skin, the shade of gold Maglor’s voice would spin the air with, the disordered waves of Celegorm’s hair, the light in Curufin’s eyes when he watched Celebrimbor when he thought no one else was looking, the way the twins walked in perfect sync, and the words Caranthir spoke with his body when he wasn’t feeling like talking that day? (Don’t forget; don’t forget, never, ever). If he forgot, then _they_ would have well and truly beaten him. 

He squinted against the bright orb of yellow light ridding the sky, pained by its brilliance after so long in the dark. The scent of open plains slammed into him. The wind threading cold fingers through his hair that hung dull and matted against his face, Fingon’s arms so strong and warm and tight about him. 

He hadn’t thought it real. He had long since given up hope.

When the Orcs first took him, threw him down bound and blazing before Morgoth’s feet, he’d been so sure he would never break. He would defy his father’s murderer until his dying breath. He would have a good death, an honorable one, hold his head high, pride ridding like wings upon his shoulders until the very end. Only the end had never come, and the quick, but brutal death he’d imagined was denied him, forever snatched out of his desperate grasp by laughing, cruel eyes.

He’d never imagined such a bitter fate. How could he? Child of Light, of fair Valinor, that he’d been. What had the Noldor really know of suffering in those tender days beneath the Two Trees?

Oh, but he had learned. He had learned the sound of begging from his own lips, tasted the sourness of screams that went forever unanswered. Hope died a sad, unremarked death in the bowels of Angband for Maedhros Fëanorion.

But this was no dream. Under his hand (don’t think of the fate of his right, not yet) cotton slipped between his fingertips. Strange to think he’d forgotten what such softness felt like. 

Maglor had come not an hour ago; worry pulling down his brow as he fretted over how to tell his brother of his maiming, as if such a loss could break Maedhros when he’d still been reeling at the sound of an Elven voice after how long? The sound of his brother’s voice threatened to pull him under the tide of memories, but he couldn’t think (not yet, not yet, a bit more time before he was forced to analyze the exact details of everything he’d lost, of the steps in his breaking).

Sleep pulled heavy at his eyelids, the very idea sending spots of nostalgia running down his spine. (Did he even remember what true sleep felt like?) But more had come, crowding around his bed, touching him, caressing hand and hair and cheek, and he couldn’t close his eyes yet. These faces peering at him were the ones attached to the names that had kept him from the fall into insanity. 

Maglor, sweet Maglor, with his great heart and that infernal optimism that ever amazed Maedhros. Celegorm, untamable, stubborn to a fault and just as loyal, reminding Maedhros perpetually of the hounds he loved to keep company with. Caranthir, more comfortable brooding on his secrets than unlocking the mysteries of metal and possessing the quicksilver-temper of a rabble-rouser, but underneath that a thoughtfulness of nature that stepped softly into a room and covered his brothers like the roof of home. Curufin, a curious child, opening like a flower’s bloom under love, Father pouring it over him, but Curufin still eager and hungry for more. Amras, the laughter of their family, eternal mischief in his eyes. Amrod, wild and silent and leading his twin into every adventure. Celebrimbor, so much seriousness in those grey eyes so like his father’s, so much talent in those hands just like his father’s.

And Fingon, reckless, bold, brave, beautiful beloved. The one, the only one, he had ever loved. The one he would still be in love with when the stars shook from the sky.

Staring up into these faces, these names that had been the knots holding his mind together in hell, it _hurt_. He felt the true measure of all he’d lost begin to take shape. All those dreams, all those treasured memories, everything he’d promised to the darkness as he hung like a broken toy, he realized with sickening clarity, were lost to him. The Maedhros these faces knew and loved had died. 

He was as dead to himself as to any of them. He couldn’t go back, couldn’t be that person. He’d been forever changed. 

Only these eight faces –his brothers, nephew, and Fingon—remained of the old Maedhros. He realized with cold, ruthless clarity, that the entire world could burn as long as these eight were protected. 

All the softness, the mercy, the open, easy love, had been burned away in Angband’s pits. His faith in the world was dead. Maybe it had died before, on the white beaches of Alqualondë, or when he’d watched his father burn the ships and known Fingon would never forgive him, or when Curufin cradled their father’s burnt body in his hands watching, helpless, as it dissolve into ash within his arms.

Maedhros flinched away from the touches (even from these eight he could not bear it). There was a terrible silence, and the world seemed to tilt, spinning out of control as their eyes (hurt, so hurt, they didn’t understand. He never wanted them to have to understand) hit him like accusing blows. 

He had to focus, pull himself together for the eyes watching, watching, watching him. And now he saw the others, so many crowded inside the tent, too many (brothersunclecousinsnephew), all expecting him to be something –damaged, leader, elder brother, king, steadfast rock, insane.

Where was his famous control now? Focus hadn’t kept him from breaking in Angband, or trapped the screams behind bloodied lips. All the strengths he had prided himself on in Valinor and served his House so well –polite smile, silver-tongued, perfect politician—had failed him when he needed it most.

The eyes looking at him seemed to dig into his skin, pulling, pulling, pulling, like fishhooks (do something, say something, _be_ something). They were searching for their lost brother, nephew, cousin, in the shell on the bed. But he wasn’t here. That man had crawled away to die in the darkness, curled into himself and sobbing for his father long, long ago.


	24. Chapter 21

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 21

The sun’s rays blazed their last defiance over the western mountain’s craggy heads, bursting across the sky in fierce golden bars. Shadows piled up on the backs of the foothills where the trees stretched long and dark across the ground. The tired, but exuberant, voices of the returning company of soldiers filled the dusk.

Barúnen leaned over in his saddle, and offered Glorfindel a wine skin, “You earned it.”

Glorfindel accepted the skin with a creeping smile, “My thanks. But I did nothing any of you did not.”

Faron, riding behind them, snorted, “Come off it. You must have ended, what, fifty of the wretches?”

Glorfindel laughed, almost spitting out his mouthful of wine. “Were you daydreaming through the battle? There were not more than seventy Orcs total.”

“If I daydreamed it was with me in your place!” Faron swept his cloak back, and planted a hand on his hip. He tilted his chin to complete the obnoxious pose. “Yes, thank you, my good men. I know, I know, I am quite extraordinary, a prince you know. What is that? You wish to offer me your seven daughters in marriage? Well now, I am the most sought-after man (outside my cousin Fingon) this side of the sea, so I would like to try them out first, supply and demand, you see. Could you bring them to my room tonight?”

The soldiers roared with laughter, so Glorfindel laughed too. That was what a man was supposed to do. It didn’t matter if his belly pinched tight, he forced out a laugh with the rest.

Following alongside the column of mounted Noldor walked warriors from the native Elven tribes of Hithlum. They’d declined all offers of mounts, preferring their trusted feet to a horse’s back, and often disappeared into the trees for long stretches before wandering back. Some of their heads turned at the Noldor’s laughter, but none had picked up Quenya. 

One of the female warriors broke line. She swung her bow over her shoulder and loped into a jog. She jumped, grabbing hold of her chosen Noldo’s saddle, and landed with the grace of a tigress on the horse’s back. She settled there, adjusting her hat, perfectly at ease. She’d tied her hair in a low tail against her nape, and wore one of the wide-brimmed felt hats so common among the nomadic northern tribes who called the highlands of Hithlum home

Fingon, who sold himself short in all things political, had been the one to explain the interact web of alliances and ancient grudges the Noldor had stepped into when they set foot in Hithlum. “The thing you have to remember,” Fingon had said as he unraveled the knot, seemingly oblivious to just how much Fingolfin had come to depend on his astute grasp of the native political landscape, “is how easy the Tree Light made our lives. Everything was different here. Survival took real work. If you remember that, everything else is common sense. Land management, alliances, the root of bad-blood between tribes or between the settled farming tribes and the nomadic northern ones, all comes back to survival.”

Glorfindel had stared down, overwhelmed, at the map of Hithlum divided into a hundred different territories. The northern highlands were even worse than the farmlands. “This makes no sense! Why do the northern tribes need territories at all? Aren’t they just wandering around with their herds? Can’t they just avoid running into each other?”

Fingon laughed. “Wandering around? Ah, sweet cousin, if only it were that easy to raise livestock! Come on, think for a moment. What do all animals need to survive? Yes, food. So what happens when your herds need to eat but another’s tribes’ have already picked the land clean? You see? Each tribes has its own grazing lands that they migrate to on a fixed schedule, and gods help the grass thieves who bring their animals onto other tribe’s land and eat up all the grass that tribe’s animal’s needed to survive! And then, on top of that, is the problem of just how difficult it was to Sing the earth into bounty without Tree Light! There was no one more valued, or fiercely guarded, than the Green Singers among both the northern and southern tribes. Did you know there are even cases of tribe’s capturing another tribe’s Green Singer if tragedy had struck their own? And they wouldn’t release the Green Singer until they’d passed down their knowledge to another generation. It is fascinating studying how the art of Green Singing grew. It has become far from a single-use discipline. Green Singers are also the tribes’ first line of defense, both from Orcs and each other. Remember those grass thieves? Well you can sure the tribe that had their valuable grazing lands plundered took revenge! They would raid each other, with the Green Singers battling it out, and when one tribe’s singers overcame the other’s, the defeated tribe had to pay the victors off with plunder.”

Fingon had been able to talk about the history of this and that tribe’s feud, and who they’d allied with against each other, and which tribes traded with which farming settlements, and how the southern tribes initiated the practice of paying the northern tribes with coveted food for their protection against the rising threat of Angband. It was little wonder the Noldor had made a mess when they marched right into the heart of Hithlum and settled down on lands that, for all they looked unclaimed, were far from it. If the threat of Angband hadn’t built to a tsunami only the Fëanorions’ coming had stopped all of Hithlum from being swept away under, the Noldor never would have been able to build an alliance with the tribes of Hithlum after they had so unknowingly made a thousand enemies in their carelessness. 

A second female warrior wandered over with a lazy swing of her hips. Her brightly dyed felt tunic and trousers and wide-brimmed hat marked her from the northern tribes. She did not pick a horse for a perch, but wove herself through the plodding hooves to reach the first female’s side. Her skin was brown, and freckles dotted her nose, cheeks, and brow. They stood out like the shock of a cheetah’s spots. “What do they laugh about, Thelchol?” she asked her friend. 

The first female, Thelchol, said something low in Sindarin, and they laughed.

Ingeleg, a man known for his bad luck in the pursuit of a wife, said to the one with freckles like constellations, “I have room for another on my horse.”

She looked back at him, raising a brow. “I prefer my legs.”

“He prefers your legs too. But he wants them spread open for him. Poor Ingeleg, even a native bitch turns him down!” Tillivor said in Quenya.

The pressure to hide behind false attraction to the female sex did not extend to laughing at vulgarity. “That is enough. Show some respect,” Glorfindel’s voice cut through the laughter.

Tillivor shrugged and grumbled an excuse along with the ones who’d laughed at his tasteless jest. Glorfindel was not Fingon or Fingolfin who could have planted shame on their faces. He was just the prince they admired for his skills with a sword but still saw as little more than a child fresh from the cradle.

Thelchol tossed the tail of her hair over her shoulder blade, and crossed one knee over the other, somehow finding balancing upon a moving horse no trouble at all. “What is this joke you told that amused your warrior-brothers so?” She raised a brow at Faron, her chosen riding companion, as she asked in Sindarin.

“Ah, well…” Faron cast a look at his fellow soldiers for support. Some waggled their brows or winked. Faron caught his slippery confidence again, and flashed her his most charming smile. He gestured to Glorfindel, “He is something of a hero among our people.”

She turned her gaze on Glorfindel, interest lifting her brows as she inspected him. “I watched you fight the Dark. You are a mighty warrior. You must already have many children.”

Faron, and some of the other soldiers, laughed. Barúnen took it upon himself to explain, “He is little more than a babe fresh from his mother’s breast.”

Glorfindel shot a scowl at Barúnen, “I am of age.”

Barúnen smirked, falling back into their native tongue. “That you have to point that out, young prince, wins my case.”

“Ah, let him be,” Cuinhíl called from further back in the line. “I found myself a wife and had my first daughter on the way when I was his age.”

Barúnen shrugged. “That was back in Valinor. Things are different here.”

Cuinhíl huffed, “You just love reminding everyone you were born before Tirion’s first cornerstone was laid.”

Faron angled a glance back at Thelchol, and picked up Sindarin again. “Glorfindel is one of our finest warriors, but he does not yet have a wife. He is our company’s leader, despite his youth, for you see, he is a descendent from the House of Finwë. The Finwëion’s are, well…” He stumbled to put the importance to the House of Finwë into words.

“Your kings, yes?” Thelchol supplied.

Faron blinked. “Oh, you know about them?”

Thelchol rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course. Your people have only slept under our patch of stars one hunting season, but the sons of your King of Kings have dwelt with us many seasons. They are friendlier too. You are not unpleasant though. You come out and hunt the Dark with us, but you do not come dancing or feasting with us as some of the sons of the King of Kings’ people do. They come for our festivals and bring many fair and clever things to trade.”

The walking female had her head tilted back, eyes on the sky, as she said, “They are friendlier, yes, but our people like them best because their King of Kings pushed the Dark back, and freed our patch of stars from the Dark God with his life. He was a mighty warrior. We saw him from afar battling the Beasts of Fire.”

Cuinhíl said in Quenya, “King of Kings? More like a madman for a king, and a worthless king at that.”

“Well said!” Dínenthion called from further back in the line, jaw a tight line. His brother had perished on the Helcaraxë. “Fëanor is lucky he got himself properly butchered before our _true_ king arrived.”

Glorfindel grimaced at the ugly language disrespecting Fëanor’s death. He was not the only one to frown, but some of the soldiers’ faces split into hungry grins. Glorfindel had seen that kind of glee in the eyes of Elves who’d defiled the images of the Valar after Mandos laid his Curse upon them. Disillusionment, even hatred of the gods were one thing, but Glorfindel had seen men piss on an image of Varda. That was just sick.

Cuinhíl’s was one of the faces grinning like a wolf eager for a kill, “My coin would have been on King Fingolfin. And it would not be a bloody nose Fëanor walked away with! Our king would have beaten him into the dirt!”

“Here, here!”

“Don’t be idiots,” Faron cut off the round of cheering. “This is _Fëanor_. Didn’t you hear what happened when he died? They say his body burned away to ash. He knew all kinds of Deep Secrets. He even learned the language of the Valar. Who knows what Powers he possessed?”

“Black secrets Morgoth taught him, I wager,” Dínenthion’s lip curled like a dog’s snarl. “I heard a rumor he was only able to craft the Silmarils under Morgoth’s guidance.”

Barúnen dismissed the words, “You heard that rumor in Trion. I know you did. I heard it too. I do not believe a word of what they used to say back then.”

“He was nothing but a murderer,” Arassam’s voice dropped into the argument with the freezing tone of ice. Arassam had lost his wife in the crossing.

A silence crept between them, full of uncomfortable eyes, and everyone pointedly not looking at those among them who had joined the Fëanorions at Alqualondë.

Arassam’s said, lips curled, and face ugly with his hate, “He was a filthy, back-stabbing whoreson, and we are all better off with him gone.”

Heads nodded agreement, but some faces turned away, not from the sentiment behind the words –for Fëanor had left them to die—but the disrespecting of the dead. 

“What are you speaking of that has laid itself over your faces like death?” Thelchol raised an expectant brow at them, “Well?” No one volunteered an answer. “If it is Orcs or other matters of the Dark, I want to know.”

Faron, hand clenched in his reigns as he answered with a riddle only the Noldor would understand, “It was a certain kind of Dark, yes. But it is long slain.”

None of the Noldor elaborated, though Thelchol pressed for a more direct answer. Finally she gave up with a huff, and leapt down from her perch, landing light as a mountain goat. “You Noldor are far less fun than those of the King of Kings.” She jerked her head at her friend, and the two wandered back to their people without a backwards glance.

A brooding silence hung over their party as they followed the road down from the mountain’s pass and into the flatlands below. The Elves of Hithlum began peeling off in clumps. Most struck north, but others hailed from the various settlements in the south and did not break off until the Noldor picked a favorable spot for the night’s camp. They, who had been born under starlight, found the moon more than enough light to illuminate their path, and pressed on towards home. 

As his men set up camp, Glorfindel did nothing to lighten the soldiers’ spirits and bring back the mood of victory they had earned from their latest skirmish with the Enemy, just as he had done nothing to derail their disparaging of Fëanor. Such feasts of slander were a regular occurrence across the Ice, as if nursing hatred would warm freezing bones. The dehumanizing of Fëanor disturbed him, yet he knew from experience that his voice held no power to sway a heart determined to hate. 

He had long shed the child who’d looked into a face he worshiped as his idol, and seen ugliness but not been able to name it madness. He couldn’t say the exact moment he’d looked back at those confusing events leading up to the Ship Burning with an adult’s eyes, only that one day he had. One day he looked into his memories and given those things names and given the one who’d caused them forgiveness. He’d carried the branch of bitterness strapped to his back across the Helcaraxë, but he wasn’t a confused child anymore, and Fëanor wasn’t his idol. Fëanor had been just a man, and so much more than one. Yet, he’d also been like glass cracking under the strain of too great a weight. Fëanor had been upon the brink of insanity, perhaps had already fallen into it. 

Not an excuse for his actions, but a reason. A reason enough for Glorfindel. 

As the soldiers –his command—sat down to a supper of silence, Glorfindel had to act. It was his _duty_. As much as he had grown to despise it, his prowess in combat had earned him an exalted status (false admiration as it was). 

It did not take much to rouse the soldiers’ spirits once he started. The soldiers wanted to return to the high of victory, as they wanted to cling to the bitterness grown under their tongues against Fëanor. Leading someone into doing something they wanted was easy; it was getting them to stop doing something they wanted that betrayed the thinness of their respect for him who was hero and prince, but also reserved, shy, and young enough to be some of these men’s grandson. 

A jostle of soldiers crowded around his campfire, slapping him on the back, passing him drinks, and prodding him for accounts of his every battle –his every kill. From the soldiers’ mouths spilled the wild rumors haunting Glorfindel back at the main settlement where he couldn’t walk down a street without being pestered and praised by admiring men and flitting women alike: ‘I heard you broke one of those hulking rock-monsters’ necks with your bare-hands!’ ‘Prince Glorfindel, you are so brave. I heard how you slew a whole company of Morgoth’s foul beasts single-handedly!’ ‘My father told me you shone like one of the Vala in the last battle!’ ‘Not even Prince Finrod has been blessed with the image of the gods as you are, my prince.’

Their people wanted a hero. They’d found one in Fingon and Glorfindel as the two princes most often out with the patrolling companies. In a world of too little hope, Glorfindel had become one of the stars his people glorified and set before their eyes.

Glorfindel’s patience had long run dry. Now when a soldier slid into the seat beside him asking for the tale of this or that victory one more time, it grated. Now when women caught at his sleeve as he passed, and spoke of their admiration, or others of a bolder nature offered him a night with their bodies, the feeling of being trapped in his own skin suffocated him. Girls asked him to dance, and he wanted to run away. Men bought him drinks and called him a hero, and he wanted to disappear.

They broke camp with first light and rode through the flat lake lands, setting a brisk pace with only brief breaks and light conversation. Each soldier was eager to be home. 

The bells in the watch towers rang as they passed. As they passed through the last stretch of forest before they broke into the lake valley and the sprawling settlement the Fëanorions’ hands had raised and passed on to Fingolfin’s people, one tower after the next took up the call. The ravens cawed, eagles screeched in the high pine braches, and song birds took up the bell’s rejoicing until the whole valley sang its welcome.

As the column of soldiers filed two-a-breast through the East Gates and onto the broad road lined with craftsman shops and buildings of trade, men and woman paused in their work and flocked to the streets. Children ran alongside the soldiers’ horses, laughing and pelting them with questions of who killed the biggest Orc and how many did they slay? They were treated to the welcome warriors’ deserved. One brimming with honor and glory, but most of all: affirmation. 

Fingon had explained it to Glorfindel as Fingon had come to understand it: “A soldier needs to know his people value his sacrifices. He needs to know his people remember him when he’s out there on a field of battle laying his life down in their defense. He needs to know every kill, every brother lost, was for a worthy purpose. It is not about the choicest pieces of meat he receives at table for outstanding bravery; it is not about the crown of laurel he is presented for saving a brother’s life; it is not about the girls who will whisper his name, admiring, and reciting his deeds. It is about what those ways of honoring represent: his people’s valediction of his sacrifices. He needs to know he is doing some _good_ in this world. That is all any of us need to know.”

Glorfindel begrudged his fellow warriors not a moment of the celebrations in their honor. He only wished fewer eyes fixed on him, fewer crowns of laurel were presented that he had to smile and rise high in a fist for the crowd to cheer for, and fewer girls shaped his name on their lips like secret desire and sweet dreams in the night.

Fingolfin came to him in his room later, when it was only half-over and the worst of it lay ahead in tonight’s feast. Fingolfin’s knuckles rapped against his cracked-open door, before easing it the rest of the way open with a spread of fingers, “May I come in?”

Glorfindel looked up from where he sat bent in half on his bed, fingers loosening the buckles on his greaves. He grunted, pulling the first one free of his shin. Fingolfin’s boots tapped softly against the floorboards as he approached, but Glorfindel did not look up as he worked the second.

“You never seem to be able to ride out without encountering some band of sulking Orcs, or was it Trolls last time?” 

Glorfindel heard the smile in his uncle’s voice, but he wasn’t in a mood to return it. He finished with the second greave’s buckles, and moved on to his vambraces.

Fingolfin came to a stop at the end of the bed, crossing his arms and leaning his shoulder against the bedpost. He watched Glorfindel for another moment, a soft smile on his lips. “I am glad you are home safe.” 

As Glorfindel stood and began on his chest armor, Fingolfin pushed off his perch to assist him. “I hear you had a run-in with a double-axe wielding Orc-captain.” Glorfindel cut his uncle a look as Fingolfin loosened the last strap and eased the breastplate off. Fingolfin ran searching eyes over his revealed body, but found no bloodstains. “He came out the worse, I see. Not a scratch on you.” Fingolfin’s eyes glittered in the sunlight sheeting in softly from the room’s windows. “You should be proud of your skill. You are a fine warrior.”

Glorfindel brushed passed Fingolfin, reaching behind him to yank the back plate off. He tossed it onto the bed beside the rest of his armor. “I enjoy it –more than I probably should—as I enjoyed the training with Fingon in Tirion. But I do not...I hate all the pomp, all the Honor Feasts and celebrations. I would that I could have the battles and the _purpose_ of a warrior’s life without the trappings of a hero.”

“If they did not celebrate you and clamor for your attentions because of your skill in battle, they would because you are a prince. Finrod and Turgon are not free of it, though they join the soldiers but rarely. Little has changed in this from Tirion. All we did was bring pieces of Valinor with us, for we are the same Elves who made Tirion what it was –the beauty and the ugliness.”

Glorfindel took up the water pitcher and filled the washing basin. He did not plunge his hands in yet, but planted them on either side of the washstand with a sigh. “Yet I would be free of it.”

“I know. Yet if we had remained in Valinor, you would not have been either. You avoided the worst of it because you were still young, and Irimë kept your life secluded for the most part –no doubt an element of her control over you. But you are a man full-grown now, with a man’s duties, a prince’s name, and a hero’s fame. It cannot be avoided.”

“I will never be able to be myself, will I?” Glorfindel spoke the words in a whisper, back to Fingolfin, but his uncle could not fail to hear.

“Not openly, no. But it does not have to be the burden it is for you now. I can show you how to live with eyes ever upon you, and how to use it to your advantage. It can even be entertaining if you allow it to be. It need not always press with this weight upon you. Yes, sometimes it will be a great burden, but it need not always be so.”

Glorfindel did not answer for a long moment. His fingers curled around the corners of the washstand, and the blades of his shoulders thrust out. “No. I never want to learn to live like this. I just want to be free of it.”

The floorboard’s creaked under Fingolfin’s step, and his voice fell gentle and quiet behind him, but not even the softest delivery changed the truth. “I am sorry, but we were born into this. As long as the House of Finwë stands and our people look to us to guide them, we will never escape the birthright –and curse—of royal blood.”

Glorfindel’s head lifted from its slump. He stared, unseeing, at the wall in front of him.

Fingolfin crossed the rest of the distance to place a hand on his shoulder. Even now, weighed down by this terrible truth, Glorfindel found a meager comfort in his uncle’s strong, sure grip. His uncle’s hand was the kind he could lean into and share loads. If only this was a load that could be shared.

Fingolfin spoke into his ear, offering what would have been comfort if the receiving ear were another’s. “You never have to live the life of a courtier, never play to a crowd, or put on faces for political gains. You can live as Fingon does, being himself in all but the most private of affairs—”

Glorfindel’s shoulders tensed, knotting with the truth. “No, I cannot. Who I am…it is not acceptable.”

Fingolfin’s hand slid the line of his shoulder to rest where his neck met collarbone. His uncle’s thumb kneaded a circle into the tensed muscle of his neck. “I know it will be difficult to hide your desires, but Fingon and I do as well, and—”

“It is not just that I desire men. It is—” Glorfindel swallowed.

“What is it?”

Glorfindel pulled in a deep, steadying breath and turned, Fingolfin’s hand sliding from his neck, to meet his uncle’s gaze. Fingolfin’s face hovered close enough to feel his exhales on his cheek and count every fine line of his furrowed brow.

“Do you remember when you first met me? I had tried on my mother’s dress, strung her jewels through my hair? I—I want _that_. I want to sew lace into my collars and paint my lips rose, and I want—I dream…” He had to close his eyes to get the rest of the shameful secret out, but he needed Fingolfin to _understand_. “In my dreams I kneel before a man, and I submit to him.” 

He let out a breath through his nose, and opened his eyes to flicker over Fingolfin’s face. He found no disgust, only the quiet face and intense gaze of an intent listener. Only the color crept into Fingolfin’s sharp cheekbones betrayed the matter they discussed as anything more titillating than border disputes. 

“I can never be that person. I can never be anything like him. And I do not want to be. He is weak. He is the kind of man who…who bends over for other men’s usage. I will not be weak.”

“Glorfindel, listen to me,” Fingolfin tried to rest his hand on Glorfindel’s arm, but now the shame of his desires had been splattered like vomit between them, his skin itched for distance, wishing to shut itself away where no one could see. He shook the hand off, stepping back, away, away.

Fingolfin held up his hands, taking his own step back, after all these years knowing exactly how this dance went. Some days Glorfindel could not bear to feel another’s skin upon his own. It made him ache too much, a longing that could never be sated with a hand on shoulder, or even arms around him. Fingolfin could not give him what he needed to break this curse. Or he could, but he would not, and Glorfindel did not want him to for all his mouth had found Fingolfin’s in the confusion of youth when kindness and the smallest affection had blurred in the lines between desire. Fingolfin was the closest thing he had to a father. 

Fingolfin spoke to him from the distance of half the room Glorfindel had put between them, the earnestness of the words no less for the lost intimacy of touch. “I do not know what it is to submit to another as you desire to submit, but I have lain with one who submitted to me, and I tell you Glorfindel: it was a beauty far passed the mere pleasures of sex. His body under mine, what we did, what he allowed me to do to him, was magnificence. I have lain with my wife, and that was sex, a mere physical release, but to lay with a man –whether it be in submission or dominance, it does not matter—that, Glorfindel, is the apex of beauty for us. There is no shame in what that man gave me.”

Glorfindel heard Fingolfin’s words and wanted to believe them, he did, but he could not. Fingolfin had said it himself: he did not know what it was to submit to another. He did not know what it was to desire another man to control him, to use him. He did not desire to paint his lips the color of a rose, and dress his body in the pretty things a woman would choose. Fingolfin and Fingon and Maedhros may desire men, but they were men down to the core. Glorfindel did not know what he was.

Fingolfin could not make this better. He could not make Glorfindel stop loathing what he was, so Glorfindel nodded and dropped some words of agreement, taking care not to lay the acceptance on too thick or Fingolfin would not have believed a word of it. He didn’t think Fingolfin believed him regardless, but at least he let Glorfindel pretend –for now. Glorfindel should have kept his mouth shut, but even though Fingolfin would watch him with renewed worry in his eyes, and corner him every chance he could catch Glorfindel alone, Glorfindel could not bring himself to regret his spilled secrets. 

Fingolfin loved him, Glorfindel was sure of it now. Fingolfin loved him and would not stop no matter what perversions Glorfindel’s confessed. So why was Fingolfin’s love not enough to wash him clean?


	25. Chapter 22

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 22

The Helcaraxë had been their executioner. 

Irimë watched Elves fall like a line of dominoes to the executioner’s merciless axe, mowing down the weak of body and frail of spirit, and when the executioner was feeling particularly sadistic, everyone who didn’t run fast enough as the ice shifted like a giant’s puzzle pieces and the weak and the strong alike fell screaming into the crevices. The Helcaraxë had been the sift that had sorted the strong from the weak. 

The Irimë who came out on its other side was not the same Irimë who entered it. She dreamed now of absolution. No, that was too strong a word. Did she know regret? Yes, but guilt had never been something that tore holes in her. She examined her regrets, holding them up like pebbles to the light and seeking out their color and texture, but when she had contemplated them all, she dropped them one by one into a deep pool in her mind where they couldn’t prey upon her like parasites.

The Helcaraxë also taught her there were far far worse things in this world than seeing her son pinning after another male. This was a lesson she learned too late. A pebble of regret, the hardest one of them all to force her fingers to uncurl from, and the one that caused the deepest splash in her pool. 

When Elenwë first usurped Irimë’s place in Glorfindel’s heart, Irimë dismissed her. Irimë had been a hard taskmaster on Glorfindel, but even after Fingolfin thrust his harsh hand between them, tearing Glorfindel from her, she still believed Glorfindel would come back to her in time.

Elenwë, with the soulful eyes of a maiden, and her fawning, soft love, could never usurp Irimë’s place in her son’s heart. Her mind did not waver even when she noticed the looks of longing and envy Glorfindel shot Idril as Elenwë fussed over her daughter, impairing the girl’s inter-strength and independence.

Then Elenwë had died and Irimë’s low opinion of the woman had been torn in two. Elenwë had offered up her life like a sacrifice for a child’s upon the alter of the Helcaraxë. Not just any child, but a Finwëion and the joy of Fingolfin’s heart, Guilin. 

Guilin walked beside his grandfather like a guard hound and loyal puppy after the disaster that was Alqualondë. Fingolfin could not forgive himself for not watching Guilin more closely in those hours of madness when he’d charged to the side of Fingon and Aredhel where they battled for their lives. 

Guilin had been a child, his head barely crowning his grandfather’s stomach. It was a miracle he wasn’t killed. The boy had not allowed his small stature, or the terror he no doubt felt, from keeping him from his grandfather’s side. Before he’d reached the age for girls to turn his head, he’d gotten blood on his hands. 

On the day Elenwë died, Guilin had wandered from his grandfather’s side to complete the privateless task of relieving himself in a world of white. The ice had broken beneath his feet and he’d fallen into one of the dangerous rivers that ran hidden underneath the ice and had been the cause of so many deaths. Elenwë and a few male servants had been with him. No one wandered off alone. The woman Irimë had thought so meek was the first to react, jumping into the freezing water after Guilin, not a care for her own safety. It was an act of selfless bravery. 

The shouts of the servants had sent Elves running to the scene, though not too close lest the ice break under their combined weight. By the time Turgon sprinted to the lip of the break, ready to dive in after his wife, she was already gone. Elenwë had saved Guilin’s life, insisting the servants pulled the child out first, but in those few precious seconds the freezing temperature of the water sapped her strength as surely as any sword to the chest, and her numb fingers lost their desperate hold on the slippery ice. The river’s current pulled her under, and it had taken more than just Fingolfin and Fingon’s strength to hold Turgon back from throwing himself into the water after her, so sure was he in the grip of grief’s madness that he could save her.

It had been a horrifying death, not least because the watching, helpless Elves had been downstream of the ice river. They had all heard Elenwë’s body bumping and sliding under their feet.

Irimë had determined to never think another cruel thought towards Elenwë again, even if the woman had stolen her son’s love. Elenwë had saved Guilin’s life, and Fingolfin never would have been the same if the child had died that day. Turgon, however, had not looked upon his nephew with kindness ever again. Turgon was not a man gifted with a forgiving heart. Only bitterness did he ever after bear towards the Fëanorions who he blamed for Elenwë’s death, and Guilin–unreasonable as it was—for being the cause of his wife’s sacrifice.

These things Irimë regretted: her son’s estrangement, the judgmental eyes she’d cast at Elenwë, loosing Fingolfin’s high regard, and never bloodying Fëanor’s face when she had the chance. 

She was more than the sum of her regrets though. She had hopes, too. She dreamed of Maglor Fëanorion. Love was too complicated a thing for dreams, but lust, lust could invade dreams like a lover penetrating a body. Lust woke her from slumber with its hunger, her thighs already damp and her body starving for Maglor. She dreamed of her hand crawling in his hair, his fingernails carving grooves in her back, the perfect ach of her body when he entered her, the taste of his breath inside her mouth, their mingled cries sent up to heaven.

But lust didn’t last years and years and years. Lust didn’t feel as if her body would peel away into dust unless she could hold him again. Lust didn’t outlive this kind of betrayal, the one that had knit itself into her skin, tattooed there day after day as the Helcaraxë ate another soul and then another, its mocking voice the freezing wind slapping the places that still remembered Maglor’s touch, still _wanted_ even after everything, each weary footstep, each cramp of hunger.

Love, or no love, she would not be the one running after him this time. The retribution she had dreamed in Valinor when he thought to cast her aside was but the tantrum of a child. She had always known he loved his father and brothers more, but never had she imagined she’d taste such betrayal from his hand. But even after his betrayal, she would grant him her forgiveness, just so long as it was _him_ coming to _her_ on his knees.

*

Year 5 of the First Age, Fingolfin’s settlement on the shores of Lake Mithrim, Beleriand

Tonight was a celebratory occasion, and they had put together a small, private dinner between the descendants of Indis. 

Irimë sat on her brother’s left, ignoring Fingon across from her and the disdainful twist of his mouth whenever their eyes brushed. She kept her focus on Fingolfin as he reclined in his chair, observing his family. 

With the deft elegance in her wrists, she speared a honeyed-apple and brought it to her mouth, her shoulders never hunching from their perfectly leveled line. An unrestrained laugh snagged her eyes. Aredhel teased Idril relentlessly further down the table. Her loud voice carried easily over the conversations separating them. 

Glorfindel had refused to be seated beside his mother, and instead taken the seat next to Idril. Irimë tried to catch his eye, but he steadfastly refused to look at her. Her son was a man fully-grown now, and could have come to her without Fingolfin’s heavy presence to monitor every word she spoke to her own son. But their paths rarely crossed, Glorfindel making it so by design for all her attempts to rekindle some semblance of a relationship. 

Glorfindel had reached his majority sometime between Elenwë’s death and their settlement in Hithlum, but she could pull no specific memory of the day to mind. The day should have been one of celebration, with Glorfindel receiving gifts and blessing from family as well as strangers. 

She looked upon the once soft lines of her son’s face and saw only a hard stranger. His heart had frozen over to match the barren lands of Ice, locking her out with a steel-piked barricade. But she would not be defeated. 

The character of her son was known to her, better than any other. She knew his sensitive heart that bent away from conflict and towards submission. She knew his weaknesses and deepest longings. Not even the distance of these years apart had changed Glorfindel’s nature, though he had learned at last the strength of stone. The sensitive, shy boy she had known still dwelt behind the face of a stranger. In time, she would find a way back into his heart.

The children of Finarfin clustered at the far end for the table. The Helcaraxë had pulled those four together like orbiting planets. None of them were children, yet all had been as good as orphaned by the abandonment of their father, an event that shaved the last flakes of childhood away. Unlike with Fingolfin’s children, they did not have that feeling of safety a child feels even into adulthood with the sold weight of their parents like a safety-net at their backs. 

On Fingolfin’s right, just after Fingon’s place, sat the couple of honor: Guilin and his betrothed. 

Guilin had broken every rule of tradition. He’d come to Fingolfin and announced his intention to marry, not even of age yet and asking no blessing or the permission tradition dictated Fingolfin, as Head of the family, grant Guilin for the union. It wasn’t lack of respect or love for his grandfather that had caused him to flaunt tradition so shockingly, rather, a disrespect for the world in general.

Guilin would have taken after his father in temperament if this had not been Arda Marred. She could see Fingon’s charming smiles, reckless humor, and bravery in him, but darkened. Guilin had become a killer while still a child. He had been a child nurtured in the womb of strife, his childhood forever marred by the horrors he’d lived through. The playful warmth of Fingon’s image was reflected in Guilin through a smoky mirror

His feline eyes turn to his betrothed with a shared secret as their hands brushed, both reaching for the goose’s leg simultaneously. Guilin didn’t even hesitate before snatching the leg out from his betroths’ fingertips, a cocky smirk stretching his mouth, accentuating his triangular jaw and pointed chin. 

Any other woman would have been shocked at her betroths’ lack of gallantry. This one was not fazed. She ignored his smirking, and calmly selecting another choice piece of the roasted bird. His inability to ruffle his betroths’ feathers only amused him more, and Irimë finally had to concede, despite her previous doubts, that the match was a good one. Bainar, Guilin’s bride-to-be, acted like an anchor to his wildness.

When Fingolfin first told her of the impending match, Irimë had been skeptical. Not only had Guilin flouted tradition, but he’d selected a follower of Fëanor to be his bride. 

Guilin had approached Fingolfin mere days after Maedhros earned Fingolfin’s forgiveness by abdicating the crown to him. Apparently Guilin had already been involved with Bainar for almost a year. Despite all the reasons against it, Fingolfin thought it a good match; one that would tie their peoples closer together. 

Bainar’s family was known for their devotion to the House of Fëanor, her father being one of Fëanor’s sworn-companions. 

When Fëanor’s people first set their boots upon these hither shores, Fëanor called his lords together and sought to create a group of elite fighters that he could trust at his back in battle, for his sons would not always be there as they he trusted most and would be his captains in the field. He named this elite group his sworn-companions. 

Many of these warriors were killed as they sought to defend their king when the lust for battle consumed him and he became cut-off from the rest of his army. But what was left of their number Maedhros took as his own when he became king, following his father’s example as all had seen how bravely these men fought for Fëanor. More still were slain when Morgoth’s treachery took Maedhros, but under Maglor’s rule their number had been replenished.

Irimë had questioned the wisdom of uniting the House of Fingolfin with Bainar’s House. Bainar’s father was not only militantly loyal to the Fëanorions’ cause, but the lord of a lesser House that possessed only the slimmest claim to nobility. Fingolfin waved aside her concerns and maintained that he would have approved the match even if her father had been a farmer. What the Noldor needed most were strong ties between their fractured people, not the upholding of the old classism from Valinor. 

Bainar might be the most unusual woman Irimë had ever met. Irimë didn’t think she’d even heard two words strung together from her lips. Bainar sat mute as a statue at Guilin’s side, her mouth a grim, silent line. With the dark hair and eyes so common among the Noldor, and strong nose, she was nothing noteworthy and no great beauty.

What made her so unique was her attire. She was clad in tunic and leggings like a man. No Noldo lady–not even Aredhel —flaunted her body in male clothing. Yet there wasn’t even a sliver of the provocative in Bainar’s barring. She dressed like a man as if it was the most natural thing in the world. 

Guilin’s body sprawled across his chair in long lines of lazy bones. His fingers picked at the bird bones on his plate, showing all the refinement of a common solider at meal. With a smile that looked thievish, he bandied insults with Aredhel who’d grown bored of her teasing.

The light banter broke when Turgon rose stiffly from his chair, face set in the dour lines it had born since Elenwë’s death. He threw down his napkin, lip curling in contempt as his eyes ran over Guilin where the boy lounged like the antithesis to Turgon’s stately composure. 

The look spoke more than any words. Turgon, who had become even more a recluse since his beloved wife’s death, would no doubt have preferred to bypass this meal, but Fingolfin had pressed the attendance, wishing to gather as many of his family together as he could.

Turgon bowed shallowly to Fingolfin whose body had tensed. Stiffly he said, “I find myself weary of conversation and shall retire. Idril,” he called his daughter to his arm.

Guilin’s nostrils flared at the masked insult, but this was the only sign of his anger. Instead of rising to his feet, crashing his chair back and flinging words like barbs back at his uncle, he spread his legs wider. The long fingers of his left hand tapped out an indolent rhythm as hooded eyes trailed over Turgon’s body. The corners of his lips played with a smirk that flirted with teeth, like a grinning fox. 

“Bored so soon, uncle?” he drawled, “and here I thought your squirming in your seat was caused by indigestion, not that poker you lodged up your ass.”

“ _Guilin_ ,” Fingolfin rebuked.

Turgon’s eyes flared, anticipation flashed across his face as his whole body tilted towards Guilin. Turgon had been fishing for a fight. “Good company is never a bore, but I find myself in short supply of that with scoundrels such as yourself taking up space at your betters’ table.” 

Fingon’s eyes blazed, jaw clenching, but he had learned some control over his temper, and did not rise to the bait. Instead, he put a hand on his son’s shoulder, a silent affirmation. But Guilin’s eyes danced with wildness, and now he wasn’t trying to hide behind a smirk. He wore a crazed grin on his face, the look of a devil preparing to pounce, though he’d not even shifted out of his indolent pose. Then, like the quiet shadow of a raven, Bainar’s hand settled on his arm. With unhurried movements, she turned and whispered something for his ears alone and all the violence drained out of Guilin, but not the menace. 

Fingolfin spoke sternly to Turgon, but still with love at its root, ever reaching out to his son who never failed to slap his father’s hand away. Glorfindel looked stonily at the tent wall, refusing to be dragged into a family feud, and Idril had already abandoned her seat to stand like a dutiful daughter at her father’s side. 

In the end Fingolfin had to ask Turgon to leave lest the dinner wholly unravel. Guilin saluted his uncle with a cocky grin as Turgon turned to sweep from the room, and Turgon returned it with a cup of loathing. 

Bainar excused herself with a few economical words to Fingolfin. Guilin followed her lead. He stretched his muscles, swinging his arms and twisting his neck, wanting them all to know Turgon couldn’t get to him. Fingon rose with him, taking his son by the elbow, and whispered something in his ear that had Guilin’s mouth softening into a genuine smile. Then Guilin turned, and loped out of the tent after Bainar.

Irimë followed them.

Two years she had waited for Maglor to approach her on bended knee. Despite the tensions between their camps, regardless of the fact Maglor shouldered the responsibilities of a king, she fully expected him to realize his error and come to her. He had not. But now that Maedhros and Fingon had healed the breach between their peoples, a path had been opened for her to seek him out. 

As long as their first meeting ended with him admitting his mistakes, she would forgive him for not being the one to approach her first. In time, she would even forgive him for his betrayal with the ships as well. 

The one stumbling block in her path was finding a way to contact him without broadcasting their business to all of Hithlum. She could hardly write a letter to Maglor and entrust it into the hands of a page boy or one of the companies who traveled with political missives between the camps. Nor could she ride into the Fëanorion’s camp as if she were going on a lady’s outing. She was not Fingon. Even Fingolfin would have had more freedom in their camp than she.

She elected to send a letter, but it would have to be carried by someone she trusted. It would have to be family. Glorfindel was ruled out immediately as he would have seen any letter from her into Curufin’s hand just to spite her. Aredhel would open it just to poke his nose into mischief. The children of Finarfin were also ruled out, she did not have a strong enough relationship with any of them, and they loved the Fëanorions little. 

She set her mind on Guilin. He was young, and reckless enough to carry a message to the very gates of Angband on nothing more than a dare. More, he had a _reason_ to be in the Fëanorion’s camp –his betrothed. 

With her decision made, she covered the distance between herself and the linked figures of Guilin and Bainar. She called Guilin’s name, stopping him short, which allowed her to draw level with them in a few easy strides. Her chin tilted up, and she met the narrowed eyes of her great-nephew, not the least intimidated by his unpolished performance. She had known Guilin most of his life, and was well acquainted with the boy’s quirks.

“And what brings the Lady Irimë out into the night with us lesser mortals, I wonder?” Guilin asked with mockery, his angular face already turned away from her after a brief glance, dismissing her as uninteresting.

She knew Guilin bore no love for her, but it was this very disinterest she was banking on. If she could tempt him sufficiently to undertake the task, then his apathy towards her affairs would protect her secrets from a curious perusal. “A favor.”

This earned her a quick glance, his brow quirked, “A favor?”

Bainar entered the delicate dance. Irimë had not anticipated the woman having any words to spare to her. Bainar spoke over Guilin’s shoulder, arms crossed over her chest, “Why would we want to dirty our hands with your schemes?”

Irimë’s lips compressed at the bold challenge. In Tirion she would have considered this woman beneath her. She would have taken one look at Bainar’s rough edges and uncouth demeanor, weighed her against the thinness of her noble blood, and dismissed her as of little worth. Now though, she could see the potential and strength in the woman who glimmered like uncut onyx. 

A little satisfied smile hooked her mouth. She had proved Maglor wrong without even trying: she could change. 

She tossed her head. “It is nothing nefarious. I merely wished a letter delivered.”

“Why can’t you take it yourself?” Bainar demanded as Guilin looked on, his neck a soft tan line as he tilted it back like a smug cat watching a pair of dogs tear at each other’s throats. 

Irimë brushed away the impression. She was no dog. It was hardly a mark against her if Bainar tackled a subtle negotiation like a solider with a broadsword. With an impatient huff she laid her cards out on the table, “The recipient is Maglor Fëanorion.”

Guilin blinked once. Then the corners of his mouth twitched in a slow smile. “Is that so,” he purred. “A Fëanorion. How positively _naughty_ of you.”

Irimë’s pulse jumped in the hollow of her throat as panic rode her for one high moment that stretched longer in her mind than in actuality, before she ruthlessly crushed it. Guilin was just shooting arrows in the dark. He was trying for shock factor. There was no way, _no way_ he could possibly know. 

She forced herself to answer with an unimpressed air, hand flicking dismissively at the very idea, “I do not expect a child such as yourself to understand the bonds of family and friendship. You were, after all, a baby barely off his mother’s breast when Fëanor was banished by the Valar.” 

“You would know best about the bonds of family,” Guilin returned, not the least offended. 

“Oh? Is that supposed to mean something to me?” she challenged with an impervious crook to her brow.

“I wouldn’t dare to _presume_ ,” Guilin said with a falsely concerned and overly dramatic hand pressed to his chest. When she head Bainar smothering a laugh in her fist, Irimë had to keep from snapping both these _children’s_ head’s off. 

Her mind ran like quicksilver behind her eyes, picking up and discarding any possible leaks she could have left behind. It settled on the one she didn’t want to acknowledge, even after she’d seen the way her son looked on her. She didn’t want to believe it had been _Glorfindel_ waging his tongue, yet he had been the only one who’d known. 

Guilin, who’d been watching her with eyes that reminded her of a fiend, cruel and devious, shocked her by instead of gloating saying: “Now that I have had my fun, I suppose I can be merciful.” He shrugged. “Yes, it was Glorfindel. How easily you forget that Glorfindel and I are not only cousins, but friends.” And then, like the lash of a whip, “What kind of mother forgets such a thing?”

Irimë refused to be cowed. This boy had no business throwing stones at her; he was hardly a pinnacle of morality. “Now that your ‘games’ are over, can we return to our business?” 

He threw out his arm, blocking Bainar who had taken a threatening step towards Irimë, not liking the lady’s tone. “I can handle this, love,” Guilin shared one of those speaking looks between lovers with Bainar. Turning to Irimë, “And what are you throwing in to sweeten the deal? This has been fun and all, but what is in it for us?”

Irimë pulled out her trump card, the sugar to her bite: “I have in my possession a cloak worn by Yavanna Kementári. I am sure you have heard of such gifts bestowed by the Valar upon their faithful. If you take my letter to Maglor safely –securely—the cloak is yours. Any child conceived upon it will be mighty even by the measure of the Eldar, a Child of Song.”

They did not ask how they would know the cloak wasn’t a sham; a garment that had adorned one of the Valar could not be forged by any craft. It forever carried the memory of the god it clad. In this cloak’s case, it was a green no Elven-hand could produce, not even the finest weaver, and its touch was softer than rainwater.

Bainar did ask, “How did you obtain it?”

“My husband was gifted it by Yavanna herself on our wedding day.” Irimë did not tell them of how she’d slipped into her husband’s chambers before the Exile’s departure and stolen it –his most prized possession. Her husband had worn it like a crown, for it was evidence of the Valar’s love in his eyes. She’d used it just once before, on the night Glorfindel had been conceived. 

The heady, young bud of their love had faded, and she’d felt Maglor drifting away. The length of time between his visits grew, as did her loneliness cloistered on the mountain she hated. She wanted a part of him growing inside her to chase away the chill of his absence.

She’d hidden the cloak beneath the sheets Maglor had unknowingly made love to her upon. She’d thought she could keep him forever if she had something of his. But instead she’d created a lie that would cause him to cast her forever from his side should he discover her deceit. 

If his family had learned of their relationship in Valinor, they would have stolen Maglor away from her, and any child of his body, of their blood, would have gone with them. 

A male always had first pick if the seed was his, and the female was left with aching, empty arms. It had been the same for Curufin’s wife and Nerdanel. Their husbands kept their children, and no matter how loudly they screamed, they would never see them again except on the husband’s whims. 

So she kept her secret cradled close in Valinor. And now, her son a fully-grown stranger, she knew Maglor would never forgive her for stealing the chance to be Glorfindel’s father. 

Maglor had always wanted children. They had lain on white sheets, fingers playing idly with each other’s bodies as they whispered the desires of their hearts into the other’s ears. One of Maglor’s had been a son. He’d told her as their son slept down the hall. 

The secret had sat upon her tongue, so close to leaping into the air, yet she held back even as his hands trailed wistfully over her flat belly, the weight of childbirth long shed. She had not been able to risk seeing him when Glorfindel grew inside her, lest he press his hand to her stomach and feel the child leap within her as it sensed the _fëa_ of its father. But in the end her caution had been unnecessary. She had been too free with her opinions of his brothers at Finwë’s last, disastrous Family Dinner, and Maglor refused to forget a handful of words for _years_ , refusing to visit her, swearing never to come back. 

Maglor would have held Glorfindel’s hand as he taught him Fëanor’s Tengwar. He would have used that beautiful voice to sing Glorfindel to sleep, his hand carding through golden waves. He would have sat him in his lap at feasts and pointed out all the boy’s many relatives, whispering little jokes about them in the child’s ear, and Glorfindel would have giggled as he did in his youth, like a bubble of sunshine. He would have loved Glorfindel unconditionally. Loved him even if he’d come home with blood on his hands. Loved him even if Glorfindel slammed the door in his face, angry, bitter words still riding the air and echoing with oaths never to return. Loved him even if he’d stood before him, hand entwined with a man’s, a shy smile on his face as he told his father he’d found love.

For a time, in Glorfindel’s troubled youth, she doubted the cloak’s power. But now, seeing the man Glorfindel had become, reserved, yes, but hard enough to cut herself upon the sharp edges of his face, she doubted no longer. Her son might despise her, but he had proved mightier than the Helcaraxë. 

She’d done her duty as a mother. She’d save Glorfindel from the fall his unmanaged desires would have set him up for. Glorfindel was now free to live a normal life, which was what she had always wanted for him.

“Glorfindel,” Guilin guessed.

“Yes, my son shall be a Child of Song,” her breast swelled with pride. This at least she had given him.

“We shall examine this cloak before we agree, but if it proves genuine, you will have your bought errand riders,” Bainar accepted for the both of them, the young couple keen to someday hold such a child in their arms, the dream of all young couples for their firstborn. 

“Follow me, and we might complete our business tonight.” Irimë led them to her tent with eager steps, her shoulders finally loosening from the taught line she had kept them pulled back in during their confrontation. 

Anticipation knotted her belly. It wouldn’t be long now and she would have the softness of his kiss, the warmth of his hand cupping her curves, the music of his voice curling in her toes once more. After his shoulders had quivered under remorse and that golden tongue had pleaded for her forgiveness, of course.

*

Maglor let the tent flap fall shut behind him, taking in the meticulously arranged setting. Irimë had always been theatrical. 

She’d made a production out of their meeting. Even her insistence on absolute secrecy was overly dramatic. She’d settled herself in a chair before a table of lit candles, head turning to him at his entrance, revealing a half-moon of beauty. Even that simple gesture had been pre-planned for effect. Her dress was a red velvet so dark it was almost black, signifying the seriousness she expected from him, as well as complementing her skin-tone perfectly. 

The tent had no spare chairs, the calculated oversight telling him she wanted him uncomfortable in her presence. She wanted him to feel her control. She probably envisioned this meeting ending with him on his knees before her, tears of regret in his eyes.

It should have infuriated him, but it only brought a pitying smile to his lips. She never changed.

This was to be the end, their last meeting. He’d answered her letter and accepted her suggestion of a meeting because he’d given his word in Tirion that she could have this one last conversation. He kept his feet firmly planted. He wasn’t getting on his knees for her forgiveness, or to take him back into her arms. 

Irimë rose like a long-necked swan. When he didn’t move towards her, some of the assurance bled out of her stance. He watched as her eyes flickered away from his, her fingers reaching up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Were these signs of vulnerability real? Or were they another game?

Like tossing salt into an open wound, she bit out, “Well? Are you just going to pretend you didn’t leave me like unwanted baggage? Aren’t you going to at least _ask_ for my forgiveness after your abandonment?”

Anger wrapped black hands about his throat. It was another game for her. She’d take any admittance of guilt as him conceding to her control, and he wouldn’t give her that. He couldn’t fall into that destructive cycle. Not again.

“No.” The words tasted like ice and freedom in his mouth. He would not ask forgiveness and she would never give it without his supplication. She should have stayed an ocean away in Valinor.

She cast aside cool indifference, the play she had mapped out de-railing spectacularly when one of the lead characters refused to follow her lines. “No?” she hissed, abandoning her chair to invade his personal space with her wrath hanging about her like the scent of noxious flowers in the air. “You left us to _die_.”

Maglor threw his head back, the line of his jaw uncompromising, “You _chose_ the Helcaraxë. You could have gone back to Valinor. You _should_ have gone back.”

She snarled and lashed out with her body, hand connecting with his cheek, flexed nails leaving a line of open cuts on his skin. His hand flew up to cover the injury, taking a shocked step back. But should he really be surprised? Rarely had he ever so boldly stood against her. She did not like him fighting back.

“Why do you have to make everything so hard?” And now there was more than just anger in her voice. A note of soft disappointment infused the words, asking him why he did this to her. Why couldn’t he just act like she wanted? “You left me there, Maglor. I love you. I would _die_ for you. I _killed_ for you. No one will ever love you like I do.” Her hand came up to caress the cheek she’d abused.

That wasn’t true. He slapped her hand from his face. His father had loved him. His brother’s loved him. Their love didn’t make him feel like dirt, didn’t leave him feeling like he was the guilt party for ‘making’ them love him, didn’t make him believe they would _kill_ themselves if he didn’t come back to them. 

“I will forgive you, all you need to do is ask.” Her words were honeyed-poison. They wanted to corner him, slay him, and strip the carcass from his bones. Love wasn’t supposed to feel like this. He wasn’t supposed to feel like he should lower his eyes in shame and get on his knees for a forgiveness he didn’t think he needed.

He wasn’t going to walk this path of twisting corners until he lost his way, lost himself, and was only surrounded with _her._ Until he was unable to think clearly, and so twisted around he didn’t know which way was up or down, or his own mind, thoughts chasing themselves in circles: He couldn’t just leave her when she’d fallen in love with him, could he? He’d found her exhilarating once, hadn’t he?

No. He’d always found her _suffocating_ , he’d just been too young and stupid to see this for what it was. Love shouldn’t be about holding power over the other and digging claws into the other’s skin deep enough to stop them from escaping. Love was the way his family made him feel. They would have never hurt him like this. 

Maybe she could see the end in his eyes, maybe she couldn’t read him at all anymore, maybe it was all her own wants overriding anyone else’s. Whatever the reason, she kissed him. He stiffened under the assault of her mouth. She pressed her fingers into his face, yanking his mouth back onto hers when he tried to turn away. She clung to him, rubbing her body against his, trying to _force_ him into desiring her.

He shoved her away with violence this time, all care disregarded like she had ever disregarded his every desire for the fulfillment of her own. He would _never_ lay down beside her and press the heat of her body into his skin again. She wanted him to sew up the pieces of this broken, ugly thing between them into an ill-fitting whole, despite how often he had to tear the filler pieces off his own mind, sacrificing more and more and more of himself until he looked back and didn’t recognize the man who’d lain caged in her arms. Love wasn’t supposed to feel like chains.

He left her there, panting, not understanding until he’d walked away that it was over. He didn’t intend to come back. He was finished with her.


	26. Chapter 23

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 23

Year 64 of the First Age, Barad Eithel fortress in Hithlum, Beleriand  
Fourth year into The Siege of Angband

She had decided, when Fingolfin first adopted the custom, that she did not like them. 

Fingolfin had taken sworn-companions, just as the Fëanorions had. It seemed, on the surface, a sensible precaution. Despite the long years of relative peace while Morgoth hid like the coward he was behind iron gates, the land was still full of peril. It had set her heart at ease to know her brother was so well protected, a ring of loyal, able sword arms encircling him. 

At least two companions trailed Fingolfin wherever he went, mute as sentinels, wearing the silver-blue of Fingolfin’s colors like a king’s raiment. They carried the thin ribbon of red tattooed into their right palms like badges of honor, which for them they were.

The fealty ceremony was barbaric. A man intent on entering the service of his king, and serving as a sworn-companion, would swear an oath unto death. With a silver knife, the future companions would slice their right palms before Fingolfin did the same with his left. Then, with many noble declarations, the king would take the bloodied palm of his companion, so that they were one fist raised in strength and Fingolfin could look into the eyes of the one seeking a place within the circle of his most trusted. When the visible evidence of their allegiance had healed, the sworn-companions inked it forever into their skin.

The ceremony reminded her strongly of the Wood-Elves. Strange things were whispered about the Elves who had not completed The Great Journey, and even worse of those who had never even begun it. Things of an unseemly nature, of blood and sex and dead souls. She did not trade in rumors, but deprived things had a way of sneaking into ears and imaginative thoughts.

As for Fingolfin’s sworn-companions, it was their eyes she had first taken a dislike too. They were always watching, always following, yet never revealing even a glimmer of the mind behind. Such eyes were unnatural. The companions did not speak, they did not laugh, their faces revealed no more than stone, and their eyes were as unreadable as the dead.

Fingolfin loved them, yet would never tell her what they had done to earn his love and loyalty. It was one of those secrets she hated between warriors. She was more than a little jealous, all the more so because her brother so rarely spared time for her. She hated the grim shadows at her brother’s side –usurping her place as sister and confidant—another physical reminder of all that had changed since Valinor. She hated Fingolfin’s companions as much as she hated the golden crown upon his head, far more than she had ever despised it in Tirion. 

She descended the stairs leading to the keep, pointedly ignoring the sworn-companions looming in the corners of her vision as they kept a respectful, but vigilant distance from their king. 

The stairs were cut deep and wide enough for four men to walk shoulder-to-shoulder from the outer-courtyard below to the eagle-nesting keep above. Her steps were unhindered by a trailing, court-styled dress this morning, her present one stopping at a boot-covered ankle. She had volunteered herself to go ‘walking amongst his people’ with Fingolfin, and had no intention of trailing horse dung into her chambers later.

Spring quickened the land, and from the diamond-planed windows in her chamber, she could take in the free beauty of the Northern plains. Barad Eithel had been built in the rough foothills of the Ered Wethrin, and its soaring keep, rising above the main body of the fortress on a pinnacle of rock, afforded breathtaking glimpses of the plains below. The River Sirion roared with winter snow melt from the mountains, cutting a deep gorge in the land. The fortress walls fell sheer and treacherous into the hazardous chasm, offering a magnificent defense for the southern wall. 

This was not Barad Eithel’s only line of defense however. Fingolfin had scouted Hithlum for years before finally settling on this location. The foothills were chosen not only for Sirion’s proximity, but the numerous rocky outcroppings riddling the land. The terrain was naturally defensive, and ensured Barad Eithel would never be captured by the work of any siege engine or army marching in force upon its gates. The road leading up to the outer-gates was narrow as a bottle-neck, with walls of boulders and cliffs hemming it in from both sides.

Despite the security of her new home, homesickness washed over her like salt water, abrasive and stinging. Barad Eithel was no Tirion. It had been built with the stones at hand, and with a lash of hast upon the Noldor’s backs, wanting stone walls between themselves and Angband’s might. 

The walls had been raised with gneiss stones from the mountains, and the end result was a bland tan, nothing like Tirion’s dazzling white streets and crystal steps. Barad Eithel’s towers boasted battlements and pikes rather than the smooth, artistic dooms of Tirion. It was depressing to be constantly surrounded by the evidence of war. 

The home Fingolfin had built for himself and his family was all practicality and economy, not a line wasted, not a thought thrown to beauty for beauty’s sake. It wasn’t hideous, not like Angband, but the only elegance it wore was that hard, powerful beauty of a weapon of war.

Her gaze turned to Fingolfin walking at her side. Moments of privacy in his company were rare. Even their meal hours were taken up with the flurry of messengers from Turgon in soft Nevrast, the scattered children of Finarfin, the distant sons of Fëanor, the quarrelsome Wood-elves of Hithlum, the Shipwright Cirdan, or the ever-demanding Thingol behind his wife’s Girdle in Doriath. Not only was she jealous of every hour she could tear Fingolfin away from his duties, but she was not the same Irimë of Valinor who had scorned the idea of walking as an equal among her father’s lowliest people. In Valinor, she had been a princess not a king. She would never devote herself to the people like Fingolfin did–as if to stopper up all the gaps in his life—but sacrifice a morning of her time to lift their spirits? This she could do.

Yet for all that she had been brought up in court, there were so many lessons of rule she’d never learned, that none of them in that artificial cage had ever even thought to contemplate. What did a ruler do when war became a way of life? How did a ruler plug the cracks of fear and doubt in their people’s minds when a crier dutifully announced a list of dead from the last skirmish in the North? How did a ruler pump courage and hope into his people’s hearts like blood?

For all intents and purposes the Noldor had Morgoth fenced in the North, trapped like a rabbit in its hole. The flaw, that not even a constant watch upon the Iron Gates could avoid, was that Morgoth was a gofer not a rabbit. He didn’t have just one escape route. Orcs, spies, wolves, released thralls whose wills had crumpled beneath the dread eyes of the Black One, and other manner of twisted, nightmarish monsters, crept out of the North and slithered into Elven lands. 

They reached the bottom of the hefty staircase –yet another of Barad Eithel’s many built-in protections—and passed into the bustle of the outer-courtyard. The noise was incredible: clanging of mental upon metal from the blacksmith’s shops, shouting and laughing soldiers showing-off on their leisure time, screaming toddlers, barking dogs and dozens of stabled horses. But the protests of her ears was nothing to her nose, the comforting smell of the bake-houses was polluted by piles of horse dung. Thank the Noldor’s past city building experience that sewers had been laid down like a grid work before the first stone in the walls had been set. 

“Have you met our wine-matron?” Fingolfin’s voice snapped her eyes to his. The tightness of his mouth spoke louder than any word his disappointment at seeing her press a perfumed hand to her nose.

She clenched her jaw and slowly, as if of her own design, lowered the offending limb. No one else could make her belly squirm with guilt like Fingolfin. It hadn’t always been so, not in Tirion when she’d been so sure she knew best; but here, after she’d been proved wrong in so many things, and her brother stood tall and wise like the moon? Yes, here he could reproach her with a look. Not that she’d ever show him how much influence he’d gained over her, not even if it meant telling him of the respect it was born from.

“No, I have not,” she attempted to disguise her disinterest.

Fingolfin gestured to a building that was all arches and free-air encircling the deep pits used for pressing grapes, “I shall have to introduce her. She has much improved the quality and sale of our exports. A natural touch with the craft. Even the delegate from Thingol left with a few cases, and given the Sindar’s prickly taste in wine, that is high praise indeed.”

Of course Fingolfin would think first of exports. Her brother’s mind was rarely far from the business of rule these days. But she had to admit he made an excellent king. She doubted even Finwë would have done so well were he in Fingolfin’s place.

A woman with an infant on her breast advanced upon her king. Her dress and face were plain, but the devotion in her eyes as she gazed up at Fingolfin’s impressive height, made it seem as if flowers bloomed under her skin. “My king!” The woman approached with an equal measure of boldness and hesitancy.

“Dear one, how can I assist you?” Fingolfin took the women’s out-stretched hand between his. Somehow Fingolfin was able to look upon the least of his people with the concern of a father. It baffled the mind how he could love complete strangers so.

“My king,” the woman’s voice trembled, but it wasn’t from fear, “my husband served with the Raven Company in the Northern Marches. They were ambushed by a rabble of Orcs…” Her voice buckled under the weight of grief.

“I remember,” Fingolfin said softly, “they were the bravest of men.”

“Yes, such was my husband.” The woman swallowed and pressed on. “My husband was killed. It has been some months since his death.”

“Are you in need of financial assistance, braveheart?” Fingolfin’s thumb rubbed circles over the back of the woman’s hand.

She shook her head, “No, my Lord. I collect the pension for widows, but my son,” and here she shifted the treasure in her arms so that the protective blanket slipped off the child’s face, “he will never know his father. Would you, my lord, would you not give him your blessing? You may think me a silly woman, but I know a kiss from your mouth would serve my son well in the future.”

Fingolfin’s fingers twitched under the hand he still held, the only sign of his discomfort, maybe even distress. But he said, “Of course. It is the least I can give in repayment of the debt I and our kingdom owes your husband for his sacrifice. Let me see the child,” Fingolfin held out his arms and the woman surrendered her son to him.

Fingolfin brushed a rare, flaxen curl from the babe’s brown face. After a moment of hesitation, he bent and pressed a kiss to the child’s brow, whispering words of comfort as the action awoke the slumbering infant and he stared up at the strange man holding him. “I can see the Vanyar heritage in him,” Fingolfin commented as he began rocking the wide-eyed babe with the skill of a veteran father.

The woman’s empty hands twisted in her skirt, eyes shifting. “Yes, my law-father was one of the Elves of the Air.”

“I have not heard the Vanyar called that in many years,” Fingolfin said with a twist of memory on his lips. “My mother was among their number, but she used to call her people the Holy Elves. Very presumptuous, I always thought,” he finished wryly.

The woman laughed nervously. “Yes, they called themselves that didn’t they? And the Blessed Elves. But my law-father was one of the Eldest. He remembered the Great Journey when the Vanyar were the Spear-Elves still, and had no other titles amongst their kin.”

Fingolfin smiled softly down at the jittery woman. Talk of the Vanyar was a step too close to Valinor for most Noldor’s tastes. “Here. You have a beautiful son,” he handed the boy over. “When he reaches his majority, if he wishes it, he will find a place among my sworn-companions.”

The woman gasped, “My lord! But are not your companions the sons’ of lords? We are no grand folk.”

“My companions are all whom I choose to make such,” Fingolfin replied firmly. “But let this be a choice of his own making, and let no force or pressure come upon him, for it will not be a duty undertaken lightly. When I take a companion to my side it is for life.”

“I understand, my king. Truly you are as great and kind as it is said!” 

Fingolfin waved the words away, “Go now, dear one, and do not hesitate to make any necessities that come upon you known.” With promises to do as he requested, and a few more declarations of her king’s greatness, the woman departed.

“Really, how can you stand the fawning?” Irimë asked, walking at his shoulder again as they cut through the throngs of Elves all hurrying this way and that on business, yet none failing to note their king’s presence with a bowed head or word of adoration when they took the opportunity to approach him freely with small and large requests. Fingolfin was loved undoubtedly, but as with that woman, it was taken to extreme in some cases.

Fingolfin sighed, dropping his voice so that they might not be easily overheard, “I lay the blame at the Valar’s feet. It was not like this in Valinor, but without the presence of gods at close hand, some who would have once sent a prayer up to the Valar now do so to their king.” Irimë’s lip curled. “It is the nature of people, especially in these dark times, to want something to believe in.”

“It is disgusting,” she condemned.

“It is what it is. But I fear what will become of our people if the war were to ever turn against us.”

“What do you mean?” 

Fingolfin hesitated a moment, then plunged: “You are aware of Turgon’s aspiration to build a secret city of refuge?”

“How could I not be when Aredhel complains Turgon has threatened not to allow her to come along? She has not thrown a tantrum this large since Celegorm spurned her advances just before the Fëanorions uprooted to the East. She was ill-pleased to discover her discarded lover was now the one discarding her.” 

Aredhel had decaled her intention to accompany Turgon on an impulse, more to annoy her brother, who she was currently at odds with about something or other, than any true desire to lock herself away in a hidden valley. Those two often fought. But their arguments were born of comfort in each other’s presence, and understanding each other deeply but rarely seeing eye-to-eye.

Fingolfin’s mouth pinched. “Do not remind me of that debacle. But Turgon will take her with him in the end once this recent spat has smoothed over. They always were the closest of my children, as different as they are in temperament, and as often as they clash. He will take care of his sister, and I have to trust no harm will find her there.”

He clasped his hands behind his back. “It was a relief when she told me she planned to accompany Turgon. I have never forced my daughter into anything she did not desire, but this, her safety in the balance…I do not want to test which one of us would have proved the more stubborn.”

“She would have been safe enough here, within these walls.” 

His brows drew together. “You know Aredhel; she would put herself into harm’s way if the war encroaches closer upon our borders. She would think it an adventure. No, that does not do her justice, but she would think she could fight alongside the soldiers.”

“You think too little of woman,” Irimë rebuked. “Aredhel has been trained in war. She can wield a sword as good as any man.”

“It is not her skill I doubt, it is her temperament.” That gave Irimë pause. “You are one of the few who have seen her on one her dark days. Her thoughts are…strange. They do not follow usual paths, and she has confessed to me that even she does not always understand her own mind looking back on her actions. Sometimes these spells hit her and she will not leave her bedchamber for days, but those are the fortunate cycles. What happens if she marches off to war and then falls into that darkness within her own mind?” Irimë could not answer, knowing Fingolfin was right to worry. “She does not…it pains me to admit, but my daughter does not value her life as she should during those times. She becomes reckless, with her own life and others.”

“She is not suicidal, if that is what you are saying,” Irimë rose to Aredhel’s defense.

“Of course not. My daughter loves life with a passion few possess. But it is when she is not herself, when these strange moods take her, that I fear to have her out of my sight, much less upon a battlefield. I would not send a man to war if he possessed the same…illness of the mind. It has nothing to do with her sex.”

Irimë’s mouth pursed. She did not like Fingolfin labeling Aredhel’s condition such. Aredhel possessed wild, unpredictable moods, all in Finwë’s House knew it, though it was a closely guarded secret, but to call it an illness of the mind seemed extreme. It was not as if Aredhel slipped into madness during those periods of darkness, for want of a better term, she merely exercised questionable judgment. Still, Irimë had to concede Aredhel would be in danger should she attempt to fight during these spells.

“Irimë,” Fingolfin caught her attention back, “I want you to go with Turgon.” And they came to it. The real reason he had not refused her request to go walking out with him today, as he had so often brushed her off before.

Her belly twisted with the bitter twist of a painful realization; she had been degraded to the place of business. He’d spoken to Aredhel in private after she’d declared her intention to accompany Turgon, granting hours he usually spent on the concerns of governance to delve into the meat of her heart and seek out what would grant his daughter’s safety and happiness. Irimë he could fit in the pauses between scraping subjects.

He was still talking, and she forced herself to listen. If this was what she’d become, it was she who had first trod the path of estrangement, though he had done little to backtrack in years too long to count. “I need you to help keep an eye on Aredhel. I cannot fight a war wondering if my daughter has snuck out to join the ranks, I _need_ , for the sake of the war, as their king, to look upon as faceless bodies I maneuver, and yes, sometimes sacrifice, for the good of the realm.”

The cold words dropping from her seemingly benevolent brother’s mouth shocked her. Yet she should not be so surprised. Fingolfin loved his people, but he’d do his duty and protect the whole above any individual –except when it came to family. Family was Fingolfin’s weakness. 

But she answered, despite the manner of his request, “I have already decided to accompany Turgon.” 

Glorfindel would accompany Turgon, and she would follow her son. She did not speak of her designs to Fingolfin, her brother was under the impression Glorfindel would remain in Hithlum with him. But when last Turgon had visited Fingolfin, Irimë overheard a conversation in which Turgon stated his intent to ask Glorfindel to accompany his people. Irimë knew her son; Glorfindel would give in to Turgon’s request. Turgon’s family had cared for him, and Turgon need only apply the pressure of not wanting Idril to be alone for Glorfindel to bow to his wishes.

Irimë could not confide her intention to follow her son into Gondolin to Fingolfin. This was her last chance to win Glorfindel’s love back, and she intended no harm, but Fingolfin would not understand. Fingolfin had never offered her clemency for the rupture of Glorfindel and her relationship. She had hurt Glorfindel, hurt him until he’d become cracked and brittle, hurt him until he could never be hurt by her again. And that Fingolfin could not forgive her for. 

“Hmm,” he eyed her, “and why is that?”

Irimë’s teeth clenched, but she wound the mask of an aunt’s love onto her face. “I wished to accompany Aredhel.”

“You know Glorfindel is not going, do you not?”

Irimë’s pulled her mouth down into the appropriate appearance of a sorrowful mother, “I know. But he would never consent to let me visit him, regardless. I know that bridge has burned, Fingolfin, though it hurts, so much…” she pressed a fist into her belly, “he is lost to me.”

Fingolfin’s eyes released her. “Very well, then.” 

She let Fingolfin continue to believe Glorfindel would be staying with him. By the time he learned differently, Glorfindel would be beyond his reach, chained by his sworn word to never reveal the hidden city’s location. 

She had no choice but the lies. Fingolfin did not understand. Glorfindel never stopped running from her long enough for her to reach him again. But this hidden city of Turgon’s was just the opportunity she needed to keep her son still long enough to show him her love for him. He could not run from her if there was nowhere to run.

She swept the vulnerability away, and set a rod in her spine once more. “What do Turgon’s impending plans have to do with our people’s falsely placed worship?” 

“Everything.” Fingolfin’s moved away, and she missed the warmth of his body almost close enough to touch. He didn’t touch her anymore, one more sign of their distance. But she was too proud to cup his hand in hers as she would have done when they were still children. “There are many among the Noldor who yet worship the Valar.”

Irimë frowned, “Surely not so many. Did not most turn back with Finarfin?”

“Many yes, but others had families and ambitions that drove them on. You might not be aware, though, that many converted to Eru worship after the Valar laid down their Doom –though most of these are numbered amongst Finrod’s people.” 

“No, I was not. Religion has never held much interest to me,” she spoke quietly as Fingolfin stopped at a stall cluttered with trinkets. Sea shells were strung from the slender beams of the thatched-roofed hut, and sang a chiming song in the breeze. 

She watched as his hand trailed over a little carved statue of jade, his fingers just pausing long enough to draw the eye. She drew in a sharp breath. The statue could be none other than Varda in her cloak of stars. 

“A little luck from the Goddess of Light, my king?” The trader wheedled, holding up the green statue for their closer inspection.

“Not today,” Fingolfin side-stepped, and steered towards the greater privacy of the stables under the presumption of visiting his well-loved horse. The sworn-companions trailed quiet as ripples in their wake.

“My fear,” he continued once they reached the privacy of Rochallor’s stall, his long fingers running over the sleek black coat of the beast, “is that, should times darken, cracks that are now easily shorn up will splinter into unassailable rifts in the heart of our realm as fear warps people’s judgment.”

“Between the Valar worshipers and the Eru sect? Do you really believe either has such power?”

“It does not require great numbers to cause great chaos.” The horse butted its nose into Fingolfin’s palm with an impatient huff. “Do you know Finrod is seeking out a safe, hidden place as well?” 

“No, I have heard no rumor of such.”

“I am not surprised. His designs are not complete yet and it will be some years before he departs, but when he does, I will send those among my people who are most devoted to the faith of The One with him.”

“What? And embrace the Valar worship? That does not seem like you.”

“No. I have already asked Turgon to take the most radical Valar worshipers with him to his new city. I want no extremists –of either devotion—among our first defense in this war.” Fingolfin’s mouth dipped down. “Nor do I want people who would treat other beings, be it Elves or Dwarves, like some of our people have treated our Wood-elf neighbors.”

“You think you can weed out the practices you don’t approve of? I would like to see you try. There will always be those who practice customs or beliefs you don’t share, or commit unkind acts among any people.” Irimë shook her head at her brother’s naivety.

“I am well aware. Perhaps Father would not have acted as I—“

“No, he would not, but Fëanor would have. He was always casting aside those he deemed worthless,” Irimë’s tongue lashed out at the reproach she felt saturated Fingolfin’s words.

But Fingolfin did not flinch, only smoothed his face to blankness, “I am not such a tolerant ruler as Father was. We do not live in a pretty box where I can indulge every individual freedom or whim. These are times of war, and I will not see my people fall because they refuse to cooperated over _religious differences_.”

“And what of the Wood-elves?” she shot back. “Many of our people have taken them on as laborers. Your household would be crawling with them if you permitted it. _I_ would have taken a Wood-elf for lady’s maid. I see nothing wrong with this. How is it any different from the servants we employed in Valinor?” But even as she denied, she knew her words for a lie.

The Noldor had come like heroes, like the North Star to a lost vessel, like the breath of hope out of the West. They had pushed the Enemy back, ridding on his coat tails until he shut himself in fear behind his gates. The Noldor had been Endor’s salvation, or so it had seemed at first. 

And it was not as if the Noldor were at fault for Morgoth waging war against all Beleriand, but Morgoth _was_ waging war and the Noldor needed somewhere to live if they were to hold him back. And both Thingol and the Wood-elf tribes (or Sindar or Nandor or whatever they called themselves; there did not seem to be much difference between Northern Sindar and later migrations into Hithlum) had granted Hithlum to the Noldor. 

It was inevitable that _some_ Wood-elves would be displaced as the Noldor moved in. It was not the Noldor’s fault. And it was not their fault the Wood-elves came seek livelihoods among them. Why shouldn’t the Noldor accept the Wood-elves –willing—employment? The Wood-elves were a source of valuable information and much needed laborers. 

But with time grew rumors. The Noldor heard of sexual acts practiced with abandon, knowing no laws or boundaries, and blood sacrifices offered to trees and dead spirits as if they were gods. Or maybe it was the forests they worship? How should Irimë know? She had head of rituals sacrificing newborn babes to tree-gods and that they bathed in the blood of their sacrifices, or maybe they made dark potions from it and drank it before having month-long orgies with anything that walked, even beasts, but only the truly ignorant, or prejudiced, believed those rumors. 

Whatever the truth, the Noldor were appalled, and did nothing to conceal their disgust. The Wood-elves could have left. They could still leave, no bond held them here, and no one _forced_ them to accept positions of servitude among the Noldor. They could go back to living their rustic lives in their woods whenever they liked. Obviously the Wood-elves preferred a life among their higher kin. Even their lives as inferiors in the eyes of many Noldor, must have been better than what they had known before, for they remained.

If the Wood-elves did not object to their treatment, then what right did Fingolfin have to throw stones?

“It is different, because in Valinor we did not segregate based on race,” Fingolfin said.

“So because of their class it was all right, then?” Irimë arched a brow in challenge.

Fingolfin bent his face into the curved of Rochallor’s back, taking a deep breath of his friend’s coat and rolling the rising tension out of his shoulders. “By class is not right, no. But I cannot do anything to change that. I am not a god. Even the issue of employing Wood-elves is one where my hands have been tied. If I enforce a royal edict declaring the employ of Wood-elves illegal, then not only will it be a financial blow to the realm and but these Wood-elves themselves would be left without their source of income. And I am not so blinded by my power as to think there would not be a backlash against me, High King or no. I could do nothing but lead by example and hope. But now…” he lifted his face from his horse’s coat, meeting Irimë’s eyes, “now I see a way to cut this rot out of my kingdom. Turgon does not hold my abhorrence for the practice, and as such was eager to spirit similar people away to his hidden city. I count such people no loss. I want none who love the easy life of cheap labor earned on the backs of others under my protection.”

“And when they, we, have left?” Irimë asked in a diminished voice.

“I will pass laws,” Fingolfin’s voice was a bared blade, “laws that require an official contract between any persons of Wood-elf or Sindar birth, so as to avoid the abuses of power currently slipping through the cracks of my legal system. I will ensure that this _rot_ is _cut out_.”

“And so you would throw those you claim to love amongst the trash you think yourself well rid of? All because we employed –and by their own choice!—another race?” Irimë did not allow her voice to betray her. She made it endless and empty as the lands of Ice.

Fingolfin kept his back to her a long moment, and the pain built thorned towers in her heart, before he turned. He looked like their father in that moment, with wisdom and sorrow ridding his brow like a winged crown. “I love Turgon no less. I would love him even if he took up a spear and raised it against me. I am sending you and Aredhel with Turgon because I want you safe, not because I am condemning you. It is not a prison sentence. If you choose not to go with Turgon, then that is your choice. But if you were to remain, I would hold you under the same laws as the rest of my people.” 

“But you do judge us.” The words ate the air around them, seeming to suck out all the oxygen and leaving something heavy like lead in her lungs.

“I will never love him less,” Fingolfin restated, but it was only side-stepping the question, and Irimë could not blind herself to her lack of place in his words. He had not included her in his love. 

He came out from behind the delicate words better suited for court than a sister’s ears. He said what she wanted to hear and didn’t: “Yes, I would judge you, and him. But only if you took an Elf into your service because you thought them inferior to you, because you thought that the proper place of Wood-elves.” 

His eyes did not see her, but looked into memory. She had known that some among the Noldor had treated the Wood-elves cruelly, but had never witnessed it. She knew, without question now, that Fingolfin had, and it was this that drove him. 

So they would make their farewells of each other, and she would never be able to forget the rebuke riding in her brother’s parting words. There might still be glimmer of love in his heart for her, but he did not respect her.

“I regret—” her voice faltered, but she forced it on by sheer power of will, “I already regret the distance between us. How often will we see each other?”

“Not at all. Turgon has revealed to me that he does not intend for those who know the location of the city to leave with that knowledge.”

“Then it will be goodbye,” she whispered.

“We shall still speak, in a manner. Turgon will take one of Fëanor’s Seeing-stones with him. Maedhros gave me but three others, enough for my realm, one for Angrod and Aegnor in Dorthonion, and a last for Finrod when he departs. The Palantíri will be better than any letter. We might yet speak face-to-face, as it were.” 

*

Glorfindel’s fingers dropped the letter, and closed the lid of the box softly, lingering a moment on the inlaid mother-of-pearl covering the box’s lid in swirls. Fingolfin would find the letter when Glorfindel did not return with the patrol he’d miss-informed Fingolfin of his intentions to join. 

He should tell his uncle in-person of his leaving, it might be many decades before Turgon opened the gates of his hidden city to march out in war, but he was a coward. If he had to look into the face of the man who had been one of the only souls on this earth to love him –truly love him—he would break and be unable to carry through with his promise.

He’d listened to Turgon speak of the new home he would build them, the man more animated than Glorfindel had seen him since Elenwë’s death. But he would not have agreed to leave the only ones he loved and who loved him behind if it had not been for the promise had made years ago on the Ice.

He had given his word to watch over Idril and protect her. And a man who broke his oath at the first sacrifice was nothing. Idril was Elenwë’s daughter, and Turgon Elenwë’s husband. For the memory of Elenwë’s love for him, he would follow Turgon. 

He gathered his cloak, buckling on his sword, and strode for the door. He turned to cast a glance back over the room that had been his chambers, his home, since Bared Eithel’s rising. He took nothing with him but what he carried on him. Everything else he left in anticipation for the day of his return. A few decades, a century maybe, but this new siege could not last much more than that. He would come home. 

He shut the door behind him and set a brisk pace through the hall. He needed to clear the family wing without passing any faces that would break him. He heard laughter. The door to the family’s solar had been left open a crack. 

His feet pulled him irresistibly closer. It was Fingon’s laugh. He just needed one more glimpse of their faces, one more memory to store up in the silo of his heart to carry with him through their separation. 

They were all there: Fingolfin, a relaxed look on his face as he soaked in a moment with his family, his duties pushed back to make time for simple moments like these. Fingon with his arm thrown over his chair’s back, and grinning in a way that made Glorfindel want to press his lips to his jawline. And Guilin with a smirk like a cat’s tail on his mouth as he eyed his father over the top of his book, eyes sharing in the mirth.

Turgon had made promises that fell with sweetness on Glorfindel’s ears, but he would have turned his back on them all just to stay here, right here with these three men who had made the breath in his lungs not feel like glass on its way down. But Elenwë had loved him too. She had called him son and he had called her mother. She was dead and Glorfindel had made a promise to the memory of her love. He would not break it.

*

Irimë accompanied the host of Noldor, up to a third of Fingolfin’s people, into the hidden valley. There they built Gondolin and made that valley the fairest in all Middle-earth. The towers of their city cut the blue heavens in spirals of white marble, and its streets were broad and straight. The pinch of homesickness in her belly was soothed, for Gondolin rivaled the glory of Tirion. 

It was easy to forget, basking in that beauty, feet dangling beside Aredhel and Idril’s in a garden pool, that it had been built on the hunched backs of Wood-elves who’d drug the quarried rock, slab by slab from the mountains. The Noldor were quick to forget the sweet wines and golden wheat fields that lay rich as a woman’s womb across the valley floor, were tended by hands that had grown thick and calloused from swinging hoes.

Honeyed promised of an end to fear, of a return to a peaceful life free of Angband’s shadow, of new lands for those who had lost theirs to the Noldor’s coming, of a better life, lured Wood-elves into following Turgon’s host. Willingly they had come into Gondolin, but willingly they could never leave. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren they bore in that valley were cursed to live out a life they had not chosen, as second-class citizens in the city their parents had raised.


	27. Chapter 24

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 24

Glorfindel was running away again. 

In Valinor, he’d learned how to hide in plain sight. Irimë taught him how to blank his face and cut the emotions out of his eyes. In Barad Eithel he learned how to smile and posture until everyone but those closest bought the act and didn’t think to look beneath the façade. But in Gondolin he learned what a true cage felt like.

He had to outrun it all: Irimë, who kept pecking at him even after he’d fled from the confinement of her nest. The games of pretend, forever play-acting for the People who tore pieces of him away, swallowing them down their greedy gullets. They kept pulling and pulling, and he kept burrowing deeper and deeper into himself. (Don’t let them see, don’t ever ever ever let them see).

Fulfilling his role as a soldier was never the problem. He enjoyed the mindlessness of those duties: the way his mind shut down when he trained, focusing on nothing but the way his body moved, the weight of a sword in his hands, taking him back to the years of his youth on the Athlete’s Fields, hearing Fingon’s laugh, seeing that blazing smile in his minds-eye. But his new status as Turgon’s captain had done nothing to release the pressures of his position. He was ‘admired’ just as fiercely as he had been in Barad Eithel. 

He was a Noldo prince and had won acclaim for himself on the battlefield. Brave and gallant, they called him, and he felt sick at the awe in their eyes, the way they fawned over him. His life was food for gossips, his actions the seeds of rumors. He was a public figure, and while others ate up the worship, for someone only comfortable when no one was looking at him, it was enough to threaten his sanity.

How foolish he’d been, thinking he’d ever be able to run from what he’d been born cursed with: noble blood and unnatural desires no amount of distance could ever purge, for they traveled every one of those within him, buried and locked into the iron boxes in his mind but never able to elude.

Irimë had done her molding well. But not well enough. He did not wake in the morning thinking: this is everything you ever wanted. His life was the envy of thousands, but only if they didn’t know what lurked beneath the glittery surface. He had become a pedigreed war hero snapping at the bit.

Irimë had followed him, tainting the beauty of the Tumladen from the very beginning. If he’d known she was to accompany Turgon’s host, he would never have come. Promises be damned, he would have fled Turgon’s side in shame rather than doom himself to living within a hundred miles, much less the same city, as the one who wanted him to call her mother again.

Irimë, clever witch that she was, had known he’d want no part of her and come in disguise. Glorfindel never would have thought she could lower herself to walk as a common woman, discarding fine silks and velvets, treading the miles between Hithlum and the sheer cliffs of the Crissaegrim on her own two feet, but she had. Another might have been flattered at the intensity of her pursuit. Glorfindel knew her better.

She’d set her mind on fostering a relationship with him and far be it from anyone, including him, to get in her way. She inevitably wormed her way into crossing paths with him, forcing her presence on him, if only for those few moments before he escaped her. Even the sight of her face across a hall, stirring up flashes of memory, was too much to bear.

He refused to acknowledge her attempts to mend fences because it would always be about her. She was only doing it to feel better about herself, not because he needed her. She wanted him to be a part of _her_ life, not be a part of _his_. More, he would always know, even if she never said another word, that she believed him dirty for desiring males. The knowledge of her condemnation, her inability to love him without restraint, would forever undermine any relationship she tried to build.

There was nowhere to hide. No place within this cage of mountain walls that he could call sanctuary. This was a prison and Turgon his jailor. 

That was not to say he hadn’t looked for an escape route. The thought of forcing the guards of the Hidden Way to let him pass was a fond daydream he’d never act upon. It would have been too easy to let the glimpse of freedom at the tunnel’s end cloud his judgment. In the heat of the moment, when no words of persuasion would entice the guards to stand aside, the force of a body pushing into another, the burn of running legs, could twist into a flashing sword clearing the bodies trapping him, holding him in captivity. He wasn’t so consumed with his own thirst for freedom that he would shed blood.

But restlessness would come upon him until he couldn’t breathe with its weight on his chest. Then he sought secret paths into the Encircling Mountains, needing to catch air free of the valley’s repressive taint in his lungs. It was on these treks he discovered the Cirith Thoronath, a treacherous path climbing high into the shoulders of the mountains. 

Chance gave him the time to explore it all the way to its source in the mountain heights. When he reached its summit and looked down, he caught a glimpse of green plains with the River Sirion running like a silver ribbon, like the sparkle of diamond-edged freedom far below. His belly had clenched and he’d had to press a hand against the path’s steep rock walls, his skeleton shaking with fluttering hope.

Like a sailor with his first sight of land, his legs carried him at a reckless speed down the summit until the glimpse of freedom was swallowed up by twists and turns. But he’d seen it, and nothing could steal this joy from his heart. He’d not cast a thought back to the city he’d forsaken or the king who expected his return in only a few days time after a begged leave of absence. 

His soaring hope was all too soon snatched away. He should have remembered hope led only to disappointment. The dark shadow of Thorondor, Lord of the Eagles, Protector of Gondolin, passed overhead before the bird himself landed before him on the narrow path, halting his giddy steps. 

Thorondor had patiently, condescendingly, laid out all the reasons why he could not let Glorfindel leave the Hidden City. If Glorfindel had been a man bound by honor and duty, the Eagle’s words would have been enough to shame him into turning and dragging himself back to Gondolin. But Glorfindel was not shamed; he was enraged. Could he not even have his freedom? Must this too be stripped from him?

When he angrily and bitterly cried that Thorondor would have to kill him then for he would never go back, the eagle cocked its massive head. His yellow eyes studied the Elf before him, seeing the stubborn set of his jaw, the violence straining against the confines of clenched muscles. And he said, “Do you think you are the only Elf to seek escape from Gondolin upon these very passes? Those who came before you had much more cause for bitterness than you who chafe against golden chains upon a bed of silk in Turgon’s white palace. Perhaps it would ease your discontent to hear the words of those who sought freedom from Noldor masters.” With those words, Thorondor’s mighty wings beat against the dry earth, sending up a cloud of loose dirt as he launched himself into the air, snagging the back of Glorfindel’s tunic as he passed over him.

Glorfindel let out a cry as the ground fell away below him. Higher and higher Thorondor took him, until the mountains of the Echoraith resembled clustered pikes that would tear his body to pieces if Thorondor’s claws released him. He saw the white heads of the mountains yield to the green fields and straight, paved roads of the Valley Tumladen, Gondolin a bright white diamond at its center. Then the unforgiving heights and unassailable slopes of the Crissaegrim rose beneath his dangling legs. 

Finally Thorondor descended, and the ground ran up terrifyingly fast. The great eagle banked sharply to the left and Glorfindel clutched the hard talons, the only thing between himself and freefalling. Now he could see a honey-comb of caves gorged into the vertical rock face of the Crissaegrim. Into one of these caves Thorondor swooped, the width of his wing span barely clearing the cave walls. Elegant as a haughty hawk, Thorondor set his burden down and landed next to him.

Rolling to his feet with a glare at the bird that snatched him without a by-your-leave, casting him yet again into the role of helplessness, Glorfindel took stock of his predicament. There would be no escape out the mouth of the cave, unless he considered a few moments as he fell in freedom worth death. 

The caves were not dark as they should, by right, be. He craned his head up. The caves, while deceptively narrow at their mouth, flared open a few paces inside. They had looked like a collection of separate roosts, but were in reality one immense chamber hollowing out the mountain. The light came from the multiple holes in a soaring ceiling which let in sheets of golden light.

Thorondor had set his captive down at the center of this echoing chamber, and with a toss of his brown-feathered head, he let out a screech, calling his flock to assembly. The sound of flapping wings, screeching birds, and talons clipping against the rock floor as the eagles shuffled forward, was amplified by the lofty cavern until the noise bounced off the encircling cave walls and deafened Glorfindel. He watched, hand tight around the hilt of his sheathed sword, as dozens of white and yellow eyes blinked at him. 

“Bring Ulthir forward,” Thorondor commanded, deep voice silencing the eagles’ chatter. 

Glorfindel spun around as the sound of soft, _Elven_ footsteps approached him from behind. He schooled his face into the mask he wore when he walked the white streets of Gondolin and whispering, pointing fingers, and watching eyes followed his every move. A willowy, brown-skinned woman padded from the circle of eagles.

One of the eagles hopped forward and laid its right wing like a shield about the woman. The eagle shot Glorfindel a suspicious glare from eyes as white as its head, and demanded of Thorondor, “How can we trust this Elf? Think of the wrongs his people have committed against Ulthir and her kin.”

“Peace Landroval, no harm shall befall Ulthir.” Thorondor turned to the woman, “I would have you share your tale with this Elf, though he be a Noldo who you have little love for. I found him upon the same path you and your companions trod, seeking freedom from the Hidden City as you once did. Come, let his proud ears measure his golden chains against the steel that holds you and your people so that he might behold his own fortune.”

The woman frowned at Thorondor’s words, and when she turned her eyes on Glorfindel they were not condemning, but he cringed away from the light of pity he saw within. He wanted no one’s pity. “Condemned to servitude as my people are, a cage is still a cage despite its trappings. But I shall do as my Lord Thorondor requests and tell you of how I came to dwell among the Great Eagles.”

“I never tasted the free woods or open plains my people still dream of and remember with longing. I was born in Gondolin and have breathed nothing but this mountain air. When I was newly come to my majority, I learned of a group of my people who planned to cross the mountains in search of the lands our people forsook in their foolishness. In secret, we fled Gondolin in the night, for the Golodhrim would have prevented our going if they could. You know the rules as well as I. None can leave Gondolin be they Golodhrim or Wood-elf. Some among us had already explored the mountains in preparation and discovered the secret pass, and it was this way we took. We had nearly reached the summit when a thunderstorm rolled out of the West and turned the already dangerous path impassable. We thought to await the storm’s passing, but fate was not with us and lightning high upon the mountain shook loose a fall of rocks and all but I among our party was swept to their death into the chasm below.”

Here the woman paused, face sharpened in sorrow. “Landroval found me, stranded on the pass, blocked in by fallen rocks on both sides. There I would have died if he had not spied me and carried me to his home.” She smiled at the eagle standing like a guard at her shoulder. She stroked the soft feathers of the wing still encasing her. “And here I have remained ever since. The eagles heard my tale, and in the goodness of their hearts they would not send me back to a life of servitude.”

“Yet they would not let you gain freedom either,” Glorfindel’s blunt words snapped the smile off the woman’s lips. But it was no more than the truth. What were these caves but another kind of prison?

The woman’s mouth thinned and Landroval snapped his beak at Glorfindel. “Calm yourself, Grandson,” Thorondor addressed Landroval, and then at Glorfindel: “I see you still lack discernment. Think of the great evil that would befall Middle-earth if Ulthir had been captured by the Enemy’s forces? I have been charged with the guardianship of this valley, and to Turgon did I also swear to guard against not only spying enemies, but Elves who had grown weary of Gondolin and sought the wider lands. Neither can be allowed to pass for the greater good of the world.”

Glorfindel wanted to bare his teeth. Oh, he understood very well why they would never let him pass, even if he did not intend to let Morgoth ever take him alive, nor let wine loosen his tongue. Selfish perhaps, to seek his freedom before the safety of others, but he found it hard to care.

“I have found happiness here.” The woman’s fingers tightening around the feathers of her protector.

“Happiness as the only one of your kind? Happiness in loneliness, trapped here in these caves with eagles as your captors?” Glorfindel bit out, angered by the woman’s passivity that she would abandon the hunger for freedom that had seemed to burn so brightly within her, and for what? To keep safe the city of those who had used her and her people grievously?

“My lord,” the woman turned to Thorondor, stepping out of the shadow of Landroval’s wing, “I would defend the eagles who I have taken as my family against these accusations. Let my children be called.”

Thorondor’s eyes narrowed in long thought, before he conceded with a bow of his heavy head. “Let it be as you say. Gwaihir,” Thorondor turned to a golden-headed eagle on his left. “Call the Thoronhen.” As Gwaihir left the assembly, Thorondor answered the questions circling Glorfindel’s mind, “The Thoronhen are the product of Ulthir and Landroval’s love.”

Glorfindel’s eyes snapped back to the defiant woman who seemed to dare him to judge her. But he said nothing, keeping his silence. Who was he to judge the path love took? 

“My grandson Landroval was born into his form, unlike myself and those of the first generation of Great Eagles. I once walked in the Children’s form beside Manwë before my lord gave me this task. Not so my descendants. They have no power over any form but the one they were born into. Yet when I saw the love my grandson bore this woman, I granted him the ability to express his love in body as well as spirit.” 

When Gwaihir returned, three beings flew behind him and all thoughts of strange matings were pushed aside at the new wonder before him. The three Thoronhen landed in the circle on Elven-feet, arms spread wide like the wings on their backs for balance as their toes touched down on the rock floor as lightly as a Wood-elf sprang over tree roots. 

In form they were nearly identical to Elves. But two massive wings stretched from their backs, and feathers downed their bodies from the backs of their hands, climbing up their arms just passed their elbows, and from their taloned feet up to their knees. Only buckskin skirts clothed them from waist to thigh. None of them covered their upper body, not even the female. 

There was an inhuman clarity to their faces, their eyes shining with a hawk’s intensity. Yet innocence clung to their skin, the female as unashamed of her nakedness as the males, as if no-one had taught them why clothing was necessary. They were all three children, though the eldest two had to have passed their majority.

The eldest male with moon-pale wings and hair black as a midnight sky, stepped forward, head cocked as he examined Glorfindel, a guileless smile on his petal-shaped lips. “An Elf? Do you come from the valley?” 

“Yes, he is a Golodh from Gondolin,” his father, Landroval, answered, not attempting to conceal his dislike.

“He is far from his nest,” the female with her mother’s brown skin and father’s golden-tipped wings stepped closer to Glorfindel. Her curious fingers reached out to touch his hair, but he jerked away from the touch. 

She blinked at him. Landroval leapt forward with one sharp beat of his wings to plant himself firmly between his daughter and Glorfindel. Glorfindel was unimpressed and refused to back up an inch, meeting the glaring eyes undaunted. It was not he who’d approached the girl. If it had been his choice, he never would have come into the eagle’s nest to begin with. 

Glorfindel, the withdrawn, shy boy who slipped into the edges of crowds and hid behind a multitude of masks, had long ago been shoved aside for the confident Captain of Gondolin, Prince of the Noldor. 

“He is a lost Golodh flown far from home,” their mother placed a hand on the shoulder of her eldest son who towered above her, reaching the height of a Noldo. “These are my children, and the gift those you would call my captors have granted me.”

Glorfindel wanted to cast hard words back at the woman. The tone of her voice, the arch of her brow, all reminded him fiercely of Irimë in that moment. He did not like the way the woman claimed her children as if they were possessions, ones the eagles had, in their _mercy_ , bestow on her. But he did not cast the words like spears. The soft curves in the Thoronhen’s mouths, the way their fingertips brushed each other’s spanned wings held his tongue. 

The eldest male broke away from his sister and brother, and touched his hand to his bare chest, “I am called Rasnim, this is my sister Colfon, and there our little brother Laechen.” He introduced the trio. “What is your name?” 

“Glorfindel,” he answered simply. If it had been the eagles asking, he would have tacked on all the titles and stations pilled upon him. If they had asked it would not have been Glorfindel answering, but Glorfindel Finwëion, Lord of the House of the Golden Flower, Captain of Gondolin, Prince of the Noldor.

“Are we to help you find your way home?” asked the youngest, surveying him out of guileless, amber eyes.

Glorfindel slid a glance to Thorondor. He was prepared to fight his way out of this prison if they thought to bind him here. He’d embrace death before he was forced into an even smaller cage. 

Thorondor’s gaze was heavy upon him, considering, measuring the fierceness in his bones and the hand clenched around his sword pommel. “Yes, we shall bring him home. To Gondolin. I had hoped speaking with your mother might have reined in his restlessness, but it seems I misjudged the goodness of his character. A pity.”

“If a fight for freedom can be equated to restlessness, then I am pleased to have disappointed your low hopes, _lord_ ,” Glorfindel, Captain of Gondolin, barred his teeth.

“But you called him a Golodhrim. Were they not the ones who hurt Mother and trapped her people in the valley? How can one of their own have his freedom stolen from him?” Rasnim’s mouth tipped in confusion and his pale wings rustled behind him in agitation.

“Wood-elves and Golodhrim alike are bound by the laws of the Golodhrim King, and he has ruled that none can leave the Hidden City,” his mother answered.

“Ah! We must help him than Father, like you helped Mother,” Rasnim turned to his father’s unsympathetic eyes, “do you not remember? When Mother explained what it was like to be trapped in that valley? She said to imagine living without our wings, never able to fly again. That is what captivity feels like,” he shuddered, wings seemingly to curl up at the thought. “We must help Glorfindel find his wings. We can take him over the mountains. There are many great lands there, and he can run and run with no mountain walls to stop him.” Turning bright eyes on Glorfindel he asked, “Would you like that? To run in the great forests and plains over the mountains?”

“He cannot go there,” Thorondor’s voice spoke finality into the words, snuffing out the childlike excitement in the boy’s face, “the laws of his land forbid him to leave the valley with knowledge of its location. To do so would endanger all those within.”

“But we could take him far away, Colfon and I. We could fly him far into the East, where it will not matter if he knows about a secret valley—”

“That is enough. I have spoken. He will return to Gondolin or he will leave these caves not at all.” 

The boy, for Glorfindel could hardly refer to him as a man despite his age, was sweetly but dangerously naïve to think any distance on Arda would take him out of Morgoth’s reach. It wasn’t distance Glorfindel counted on to secure the knowledge of Gondolin’s location from the Enemy, but the high walls and sharp swords of Fingolfin’s realm. 

The boy’s face was open and free of any masks, so it showed his hurt and confusion at Thorondor’s words. The two other Thoronhen came to their older brother and denned him in their arms, whispering words of their own bewilderment that Thorondor could be so cruel as to snatch away another’s freedom. The Thoronhen did nothing to conceal their voices as they huddled in each other’s arms, and their father snapped at them not to disrespect their lord. 

The Thoronhen quieted, but Glorfindel watched as Rasnim touched his brother and sister’s faces, seeming to communicate a moment without need for words. Then, clasping his sister’s hand, and with one last lingering caress to their younger brother’s tawny-brown head, the two eldest approached Thorondor with spines straight as swords, their naked chests unabashedly displayed.

“If this is your ruling, lord,” Rasnim spoke, “then Colfon and I would ask to be the ones to return Glorfindel to his city in the valley. We are of age, and can take turns carrying him so that we need not even rest from the flight.” 

The girl spoke directly to Glorfindel, an anxious light in her eyes, “We are distressed to know you shall return to the valley unwillingly, yet we hope you will allow us to take you there. For we wish to be of some service to you.”

“The Thoronhen have ever been too-eager to fly far afield, seeking out the wilds of Middle-earth,” Thorondor answered. “Until now I have allowed it, knowing life runs quick and young in you. Yet this would be a grave mistake on my part I perceive, if I were to allow you to enter the White City with this Noldo.”

Rasnim made to protest, but his father’s uncompromising voice cut him off, “Colfon shall not go. You do not understand the minds of Elven-kind, nor do I wish you too. But they would judge her harshly.”

“Because she does not dress as Mother does,” Rasnim answered with surprising discernment. “Nor do I dress as the male Elves we have observed, yet still I will go. Lord,” he turned to Thorondor, “my heart urges me to undertake this task,” his eyes flickered to Glorfindel who had as yet said nothing. 

He wanted to press the heels of his palms into his eyes, but would not indulge in such a display. There had never been a choice. He should have known not to dream of freedom; he only ended up cutting himself on the edges of his broken dreams. He would get out of these caves at the least, and he would go on as he always had in Gondolin. One day at a time, never really living.

“Very well, I will grant your request. You are charged with the task of flying this Elf to the valley. But Colfon shall remain here, and you must abide by the boundaries I have set upon the Thoronhen. You cannot enter the city or fly within sight of Elven-kind. Leave the Elf near the entrance of the Cirith Thoronath, do not reveal yourself to any other. These are the conditions you must adhere to.” 

“Yes, lord, I will obey. Though,” and here he cast a glance over at Glorfindel and his tall, broad-shouldered body. “I cannot make the journey without rest if Colfon does not accompany me.”

“It matters not. Rest as you need,” Thorondor waved the concern away. 

It was the work of a quarter hour for the preparations to be made. Rasnim collected a small sack of food and a skin of water, bid his family good-bye, and nodded his head in all the right places as Landroval forced a few last minute instructions on his son’s head, though even Glorfindel could tell the boy was biting at the bit to be gone. 

When Rasnim finally beckoned him forward to the lip of the cave’s mouth, excitement rode high in the boy’s eyes, “I have only ever carried my mother or a kill before, and those are both lighter and small than you. But do not worry, if I feel myself tiring, I shall rest,” he tried to assure Glorfindel, but he took no comfort at all from the confession. 

Rasnim was of a height to match his own, but had the slender bones and sleek muscles of a Wood-elf. The white wings on his back mammothed him, and it seemed by all rights they should have sent him crashing into the ground, overbalanced. Yet he carried them as if they were as light as the clouds they resembled. 

Rasnim called him closer with a gesture, and reluctantly Glorfindel complied. He was unsure if he would feel more comfortable relying on the power of this boy who seemed so slight yet genuinely concerned for his safety, or having to trust in the eagles not to drop him to save themselves the bother of watching the passes for another attempted escape. 

Rasnim slipped his arms around Glorfindel’s waist, pressing their chests together, and instructed him to wrap his arms and legs around his body so they did not drag in the wind. Stiffly, unaccustomed to the closeness of another body, Glorfindel looped his arms around the boy’s neck.

Without giving Glorfindel a word of warning, Rasnim plunged his wings down, pressing them into the cave floor and sending up a spray of dust as he launched them over the cliff’s edge with one powerful spring of his bunched legs. Glorfindel stopped himself from crying out just barely. For one long moment that fell into eternity, it seemed his weight would be too much for the boy, but then their downward plunge halted as Rasmin’s wings pushed them through the air with rapid snaps and sent them rocketing upwards.

Glorfindel hooked his ankles about Rasnim’s calves, thankful that at least his legs weren’t dangling out into space as they had with the eagle. He was also grateful to not have a view of the ground. Rasnim’s wings beat powerfully above him as he watched them climb the sky to the wispy, scattered clouds.

The wind raked icy fingertips across his face. Its bite slipped beneath his whipping tunic, and plastered his clothing tightly to his body. His sword scabbard banged in protest against his hip, bruising his hipbone with the aggression of the wind’s strength.

Rasnim huffed in his ear, “You are heavier than I thought you would be, Glorfindel. I shall have to set you down soon. I know a good crevice near the Crissaegrim’s zenith.”

“Are you certain you can make it there?” Glorfindel’s elbows instinctively locking tighter around the boy’s neck.

Rasnim laughed lowly in his ear, “Don’t worry, we will be fine.”

“How long will you need to rest?”

“Humm, a half-hour. Cresting the summit will be the most difficult part of the journey. We could have cut the time in half by crossing the Tumladen plain, but I wouldn’t be able to carry you without stopping over that distance, and Thorondor’s laws do not permit my siblings or me to be seen by Elves. So we will have to travel the long way round.”

Glorfindel was silent for a moment, debating whether to speak up, but finally said: “Have you never desired to interact with an Elf not your mother, to speak with beings outside of those few you have been exposed to in your life?”

Rasnim’s head tilted towards him, Glorfindel felt the brush of a nose against his cheek and saw the glimmer of an eye. “Speak with others? I…yes, there have been times…” He broke off, his head turning back to the craggily mountains sweeping below them. “At times, my siblings and I will go and observe the Elves from a distance. And I have seen the Secondborn in Dorthonion, though the others do not know this. The eagles do not like us coming so close to Elven-kind, and would fear to know of my curiously over Men. I think…I think they believe the Men would hurt us if they could. I do not know if that is true. They are strange creatures, but I know little of them for I can understand their tongue not at all.” 

“Yet I have my brother and sister, do I need more?” He justified his forced isolation. “I know there is Mother and Father and the other eagles as well, but they are not…it is just us three, you understand? We are the only ones of our kind, and while Mother and Father gave us life, they do not fully understand us. We have too much of both their kinds in us to be like either.”

“Now I have met an Elf, spoken with. But Elves are not Thoronhen. I do not think meeting many would change that. They are interesting, _you_ are interesting, but does meeting many Secondborn change that they are not Elves?”

“I have never met one of the Secondborn.”

“Never?” 

“Never. Gondolin was built before they came out of the East, and I have never left.”

Rasnim hummed and Glorfindel felt the sound against his ribs. “I do not think it right, this law of yours. No creature was made to dwell so confined.”

Glorfindel gave no answer. None would change what was.

“Here,” Rasnim’s voice strained as his wing beats sped up and they crested a higher cleft of rock than the last, “I must rest.” 

He landed on a smooth slab of rock jutting out of the cliff face like a flattened nose. His feet touched down as lightly as the first time Glorfindel had seen him, like a dancer just finishing a leap. Glorfindel’s feet joined his gratefully. Even though the ledge was leagues and leagues from what he considered solid ground, it was better than open air.

Rasnim circled the wedge of rock with careless steps, not the least disturbed by the drop just beyond his toes. Glorfindel couldn’t see the green of land; a low lying cloud obscured his vision. The wind hollowed out his ears, catching his thick hair and sending it whipping wildly about him. Rasnim opened his mouth to it as if he would eat the wind. His arms spread wide, wings folded sleekly into two points parallel to his body. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he shouted against the wind.

Glorfindel grunted, beating against the press of the wind’s hand on his chest until he’d fought his way to the meager shelter of the rock wall. He let his shoulder hit it, and gave the wind his back. He heard Rasnim laughing over the wind, “It is just playing. It wants to be your friend. You have not met Lady Wind, have you?”

Glorfindel didn’t know if he was supposed to take the question seriously, so remained silent. 

“You have to introduce yourself,” Rasnim urged. When Glorfindel remained mute, the boy tossed his head, “Fine, just be thankful Lady Wind is far too mischievous to put much store in manners.” And then, face turning into the wind’s slap, “Now Lady, my friend here is one of those delicate, Earth-loving souls. You must take pity on him; he is quite out of his element. I know,” Rasnim nodded as if agreeing with an unseen voice, and the wind seemed to dive under his feet before running up his body in a gentle whirlwind, completely at odds with the screeching power of the air carving into the rock face. Rasnim’s hair blew straight up, wings reaching like hands above him. He arched his throat as if feeling a lover’s kiss. He laughed, the sound the freest thing Glorfindel had ever heard.

“Come, Glorfindel,” the boy held out a hand in invitation, “she wants to meet you.”

Slowly Glorfindel stepped forward, as if doubting the welcome. Everything he’d experienced since being snatched up in an eagle’s talons had been so far outside the boxes of his carefully ordered life it left him reeling. 

He’d lived so long by his routine. He had his duties and they consisted of relatively the same thing day after day. He saw the same faces, even had the same conversations over and over again. Nothing new occurred in a valley frozen outside time, so distant from the real world that it set his teeth on edge with the scent of Tirion saturating the place. Too similar, too stale, too rigid, too many boxes and laws. There was no freedom to be had in that valley, on those perfectly straight streets, in those perfectly polished halls, living out an existence behind a perfectly fake mask.

The moment he made the decision to join Rasnim on the ledge, the wind lifted. Its harrying ceased like a blown-out candle, and he walked in a vacuum of stillness to Rasnim’s hand. The minute he touched the boy’s skin the wind swirled about his feet, up his calves, thighs, across his chest and belly in playful licks, into his hair, behind his ears, tickling his eyelashes in gentle flicks, brushing his lips like kisses.

“She likes you,” Rasnim breathed, his eerily clear eyes fixed on Glorfindel’s face. “She says your hair reminds her of friend Sun. She likes playing with it. Sun warms her belly. She likes finding places he has touched and eating up all his heat.”

Glorfindel couldn’t meet the intensity of the boy’s gaze. He wished he’d stayed by the rock wall. The hand holding his was hot. His dropped eyes landed first on the too-close bare chest, seeing the gentle rise and fall of the boy’s nipples and the shift of muscles under smooth skin, brown as a fawn’s coat, before they slid off to the side. 

“I have seen Elves,” the boy leaned closer, voice the gentle wing-beat of a moth, “Do this,” he pressed his mouth to Glorfindel’s, hesitant and clumsy as he tried to mimic actions he’d only seen from a distance and never explored himself.

Glorfindel froze under the kiss. The little boy curled in the box shivered at the fulfillment of a thousand dreams. ( _I dream about kissing boys_ ). A thousand thoughts exploded in his head, and the reasons why he couldn’t do this. ( _But boys don’t kiss_ ). 

He couldn’t let that little boy of dreams and hope escape or he’d drink this light and never fit back in the box again. But oh, to give in, just for a moment, for was he not as curious as Rasnim? But more, he was starving for this, just a taste, please, please, please. 

(I am telling you these things to help you, you understand that, don’t you? If anyone ever discovered this filthiness inside you, you could be hurt. I have told you what happened to that boy who touched his cousin in this dirty way and his father discovered them. Remember Glorfindel, no one can _ever_ know. I am trying to cure you. I do this because I love you.)

Glorfindel’s fingers trembled as they brushed a strand of hair from the boy’s face. It felt like silk, smelt like wind and freedom. The boy’s lips pressed deeper, hands cupping Glorfindel’s face with no shame, thumbs running gentle as rain over his skin. 

Glorfindel dreamed of laughter infectious as the sun, of blue eyes full of tender, and passing him strength like wine with a touch, of the soul of a lion he’d been half in love with since he was a child admiring the cousin whose heart seemed too big for Fingon’s chest.

Glorfindel dreamed of kissing fire. He woke tasting heat and wine and fallen stars on his tongue. He dreamed of burning, of arching under a lover’s skilled hands. He dreamed of eyes like jewels, like Silmarils, smirking down at him, and knowing that in that moment he was all Fëanor saw.

It hardly matter now. Fëanor was dead, and even if he weren’t, he’d barely known Glorfindel existed. It didn’t stop Glorfindel from wondering what could have happened had he met Fëanor as a man. Would Fëanor have noticed him? Would that scene in the forge all those years ago have ended differently?

The door on those wonderings –the remnants of a child’s infatuation—closed with a snap. There was no need to slam it. They would lead him nowhere. A dangerous daydream, but only ever a dream. Yet one more mask to wear in a city where ‘Fëanor’ was a curse alongside ‘Morgoth.’

This kiss was nothing like the ones he’d dreamed. It pressed gentle and soft as candlelight when he’d dreamt of wildfire and a lion’s kiss taking him like the morning. Yet it was also more than he’d ever imagined, because imaginings could only take one so far and he’d never felt another’s lips moving under his.

The boy’s touch was free of any taint. There wasn’t even the shadow of shame where his fingertips pressed heat into Glorfindel’s skin. The boy did not know to be ashamed. No one had told him this was wrong; so he enjoyed it with a pureness of spirit Glorfindel could never hope to possess. And it hurt. It hurt to know how much had been taken from him, broken and torn off like hunks of flesh. The broken pieces ached like phantom limbs under the boy’s touch. And he knew, as beautiful as this was and as much as he would treasure this moment, he had to pull away because he could share no more with someone so untouched by the filth of shame. 

He broke the kiss before it became more. Rasnim blinked at him, head cocking in that childish, curious way of his as he tried to figure Glorfindel out, “Did I do it wrong?”

Glorfindel smiled. It was small and strained, but it was true. “No. But I can’t. I…thank you, Rasnim.”

The boy studied him another moment, looking with that inhuman directness into all the corners of Glorfindel’s face, before his own opened in a smile, “You shall be well, my Elf-friend.”

Glorfindel had to swallow before he could remove the stone blocking his throat enough to speak. “Yes.” For now. 

He could endure what awaited in Gondolin. The crushing expectations, the false role he had to play, the lies and games and more lies lies lies because this face, this person he presented the world, was made of lies, spun of masks he’d started to weave in childhood. 

There was never a moment he could flee to his room and strip them from his body like dead skin. Never. Because he couldn’t go to his bed chamber and be himself. He couldn’t sit before a mirror and paint his face in all the pretty colors he’d seen on the ladies' that day. He couldn’t fling open his windows and dance in the sunbeams, beads and feathers strung in his hair. He couldn’t crawl into his bed and press his body against the hard lines of another male, soaking in another’s warmth until his body forgot the cold pinch of loneliness.

But the boy in the box had kissed a boy. He’d cracked the lid and gulped the air of freedom, if only for a moment. It wasn’t enough to spring him, but maybe, maybe…The boy stretched, trying out skinny muscles, wide-eyes peaking over the lid, wondering what he could get away with. Did he dare…

(He gave us these bodies, Glorfindel. Bodies that sing like the stars when touched sweetly, and bodies that dream about kissing boys.)

He wanted what he’d tasted with Rasnim. He wanted someone to hold. (Tread carefully now). Not too hasty, don’t jump at dreams you see in shadows. But maybe, if he bided his time, the boy in the box peeking out would one day spy another boy in a box, or maybe the boy would be a man hiding behind masks too (they all had to hide), but not so tightly controlled as Glorfindel’s little boy so that he might be spotted if one only looked closely enough. 

Maybe one day the gift Rasnim had given him would bear fruit and the patience he must nurse would be rewarded. Maybe one day his belly would no longer cramp with loneliness. Maybe one day he could find a wine that could take the edge off this choke-hold so his lungs might breathe again. Maybe one day.


	28. Chapter 25

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 25

Year 316 of the First Age, Gondolin

Irimë despised the knots in her stomach as she stood before her son’s door. She never found a welcome on its other side, and lost hope of ever receiving one. 

She’d set out upon the journey to Gondolin with footsteps light enough to float under the power of her optimism, sure she would find a way to earn back Glorfindel’s love. She knew now her son would never look upon her with love in his eyes. 

Her mistakes had piled into a mountain she had not the strength to move. She could see them clearly in hindsight, like a wrong colored thread in the loom. But she had not the skill to unweave the damage done. She could not turn back time to the child she remembered: a boy like summer rain, tender-hearted, never an unkind word falling from his smiling lips. Glorfindel did not smile like that now.

She forced herself to swallow down the thorn-edged memories. She had come to bid farewell to her son –for a time. She would go with Aredhel to visit those they left in Hithlum. 

Turgon’s strict laws could no longer hold Aredhel. She would be free again and nothing Turgon said could leash her. Fingolfin and Fingon alone would they seek, as far as Turgon was concerned, but Irimë played with the idea of riding east. Maglor had made no attempt to seek her out since their reunion upon these shores, but the pride once holding her back, like a collar about her neck, had all but withered. 

She rapped firmly against the door as if she had some right to be there. It took a moment of hushed voices on the other side before it was thrown open with far too much buoyancy for Glorfindel’s hand. Glorfindel was too reserved to ever open a door like an actor entered a stage.

The arched brow of Ecthelion, Lord of the Fountain, met her. His hip popped, an elegant hand balanced on the bone. “Oh, it is you.” With that lack of greeting, he flounced over to a couch and threw himself down, ankles crossing on the armrest. 

His presence gave her pause. Glorfindel had taken Ecthelion as a friend, though she disapproved of the choice. They had been thrown together, both lords of the city, but she wished Glorfindel wouldn’t associate with such an attention-hound. Ecthelion of the Fountain was as arrogant as she had ever been, and as was the way with such vices, it was hard to endure one’s own reflected in another. 

Glorfindel looked up from his paperwork with a disinterested expression, but it morphed into ill-concealed distaste at the identity of his visitor. Despite the cold welcome, she couldn’t help scolding, “Glorfindel, you should not bring work into your chambers. You need time for relaxation.”

He didn’t acknowledge her words, ignoring her to flip a finished sheet of parchment onto a neat stack, before starting on the next. A reprimand itched in her throat. She couldn’t help the surge of annoyance at the way he disregarded her, as if she were lower than the mud on the bottom of his boots.

“I wish to speak with you. Privately,” the last was thrown at the man lounging on her son’s furniture as if he owned it. 

Glorfindel looked up, eyes slit like an angry cat’s, “If you have something to say, say it.” 

Her mouth tightened.

Ecthelion snorted, and tossed his legs onto the floor. “I will take my leave before the claws _really_ come out.” He sauntered over to Glorfindel. He trailed a hand across the line of Glorfindel’s shoulders, as he rudely read Glorfindel’s private business. 

Glorfindel shoved him away with a warning look, “Go find someone else to play with.”

Ecthelion laughed, the sound crawling in Irimë’s belly. She did not like the way he was touching her son. They had conquered this. If Ecthelion had dragged Glorfindel back into this destruction….

Ecthelion mimed a kiss at Glorfindel, and Irimë’s blood ran cold. Tossing his hair out of his eyes, Ecthelion swept passed her with a satisfied smirk. “I will come visit later, shall I?” was his parting shot to Glorfindel, delivered with a wink.

Glorfindel’s mouth twitched, but whether it was moved with a smile or irritation, she couldn’t tell. But the moment the door shut all expression froze off Glorfindel’s face. “You had something _important_ to say?” 

“I do,” she took a deep breath. “Aredhel leaves Gondolin in a few days.”

Glorfindel’s jaw tightened.

Irimë could not begin to analyze what stunk under her son’s skin like a bur. Could nothing please him? He was so determined to be miserable. 

Planting her hands on her hips, she announced, “I shall be accompanying her party. It has been many years since I left Gondolin, and I long to see my brother.”

Glorfindel surged to his feet. The mask of indifference shattered like so much flimsy porcelain. Underneath boiled a terrifying hatred. “Was it you? Were you the snake whispering in Turgon’s ear? Telling him I could not be trusted beyond the gates of the Hidden Way? Was it you who made sure I was passed over for Aredhel’s guard, a man too lacking in honor to come crawling back to this hell hole?” 

A chill slid down her spine. It had been her. But she did it to keep Glorfindel safe! He would have left and never come back. He would have broken his word to Turgon and lost his honor and position with it, and become nothing but an outcast.

Glorfindel’s nostrils flared as he stalked around the desk towards her. She could almost see the rage hanging off his shoulders like a pair of black, fiery wings. 

If there was one thing she didn’t regret, it was coming to Gondolin and witnessing the man her son became. He was everything she dreamed. He wore the mantel of lordship with grace, and walked with the pride of a Finwëion. He was a tremendously skilled warrior, shapely in body as well as face, beloved by the people above any other. He was their protector, their hero, and they worshiped him for it. Yet this man stalking her towards her was none of those things. She wondered where her little boy had gone, for she did not recognize this wrathful man before her.

“So, you have grown a bit weary of Gondolin. Perhaps a ride in the woods will refresh your spirit. A month or two in the outside world before you decide your holiday is over, and you ride back to the safety of the valley. No harm done.” The hatred in his words crawled up her spine like nesting talons. “But that was not enough for you, was it? Oh no, you had to make sure I was right here waiting for your rotten arms to wrap around when you returned.”

“I did nothing of the sort!” She could not admit to being the whisper in Turgon’s ear. Glorfindel would never forgive her, even if she’d done what she’d done out of love. “And Aredhel and I have a right to leave Gondolin if we choose. We are not prisoners. We can go as freely as we came.”

Glorfindel threw back his head and laughed, the sound like coughed-up bile.

“Why are you laughing? What is wrong with you?” she reached for him instinctively, arms remembering the press of his head against her elbow crook, the scent of newborn skin, the sweetness of eyes so blue and wide they challenged the sky.

His laugh broke off like the sick thing it was, and he jerked violently from the hand she sought to comfort him with, “ _Don’t touch me!_ ” 

Her hand dropped to her side, though it wanted to curl around her belly and hold in innards his cruel words spilled all over the floor. “I am sorry. I only wanted…I only wanted you to be happy.” She’d never once apologized, not in all the years she labored to bridge the gap between them, brick by painful brick. She never once thought to say ‘I’m sorry.’ Her pride had always been greater than her love. “I never wanted to hurt you. I wanted to save you! Don’t you understand? I never wanted things to be like this. I just thought—what I did, I did for your benefit.”

“ _My benefit_ ,” the words rolled sharp as lightning and low as snake-language from his tongue.

“Yes! You are not a child anymore. You know what happens to those who desire their own sex. I could not let that happen to you!”

“Why? Because it would damage your reputation if people knew such a vile, filthy creature had once occupied your womb?” 

She jerked from the slap of his words. “I did it because I love you.”

He turned away from the words as if they meant nothing. His fingers reached out to run over the smooth wood of the desk as if examining the grain was more important than her. She could never bear to be ignored. “But I see my efforts meant nothing to you. All we have scarified to give you a normal life, and you throw it away! And for what? You would risk everything, your reputation, your position, all for the privilege of bedding that cheap whore Ecthelion?”

He didn’t react. He was still half turned from her, but a strange smile pressed into his mouth. It wasn’t the wistful, dopey ones of the besotted as they thought about their beloved. There wasn’t anything happy or even longing in it.

Then his head whipped back to her, the light in his eyes burning uncomfortable lines in her stomach, “You don’t have to worry, _Mother_. I will not bring disgrace upon the name of Finwë. I would never do anything so _perverse_ as love another male.”

She didn’t know if she should believe him or not. Ecthelion had been very bold, but perhaps…it was possible, with a man like that, he just wanted the attention. To play a sick game keeping her up deep into the night replaying every touch, every suggestive word. 

“I thought you could learn to love a woman. If you just tried a little harder, I am sure—”

He moved fast as a striking snake. A hand calloused and strong from the life she’d planned for him, wrapped around her throat, choking off her words. She glimpsed eyes burning bright as coals, before his mouth hit hers in a blow. She tasted blood; the cut of teeth, her lips crushed red as a bruise. She clawed, tearing at his hair, fighting against this man, this stranger, her _son_ , violating her mouth. There was nothing like desire in the kiss, nor even control; it was a kiss to cause her pain.

He released her, shoving her away like trash, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as if to purge her taste. “There. Now I have kissed a woman. Are you satisfied?” Her chest swelled with too much horror to speak. “Get yourself gone. Crawl back to your Kinslayer, bitch. But do not make the mistake of thinking you shall be missed here.”

She fled. She didn’t look back at the monster she created.

She locked herself in her room, hands shaking as she bolted the door, before her knees weaken and she collapsed on the floor. She pressed her face into them, trying to hold her shaking body from falling to pieces. She hadn’t cried since her father died, but never like this, weeping, violently.

She stared backwards at her life, at every horrid step she took with her chest bloated with pride. She’d hurt every person she ever loved. Hurt them so, so much. She wanted to tear her body apart, her life, her soul so that she could start this over again. She wanted to erase all the cruel words this tongue had said, all the places these hands had stained, all the people this heart had destroyed and called it ‘loving.’

She had been so arrogant, setting her worth far above. But it had been nothing but a shroud pulled over insecurities. She thought by picking out all the faults in others she would shine all the brighter. She thought she could be lifted up by tearing others down, but all she’d done was drag herself through mud. Her ability to rise above her regrets had been yet another thing she took false pride in, thinking it made her strong, but it only made her cruel. 

They said suffering produced perseverance and perseverance character. It took more than the physical suffering of the Helcaraxë to eke out a sliver of character in her. It took the knowledge that she had lost everyone she’d ever loved. No, it took knowing that she crumpled their love in her own two hands, before she drunk the last dregs of the cup of regret her own hand had poured.

Glorfindel had been trying to escape her for years, perhaps what was left of his innocence realizing he needed to guard himself against her. But she’d refused to let him be. 

With new resolve she determined to leave Gondolin and never come back. It was the least she could do for Glorfindel. At least he would be free of her presence, even if he would never be free of what she’d done to him.

*

Glorfindel was one of many in a long line of Ecthelion’s conquests. Well, line was too linear a word. It implied Ecthelion did not double back to re-bed old lovers or have a multitude at any given time. 

It was easier for Ecthelion, because, unlike Glorfindel, he enjoyed males and females. People only saw what they wanted to, and with Ecthelion passing his body about like candy, a woman always on his arm in public, any rumors were discarded as false. How could a womanizer like Ecthelion possibly hold deviant desires?

Glorfindel was well aware he was one among many. It did not bother him. For while Ecthelion was the only one he’d taken to his bed, he was not in love with him. They didn’t even share friendship. Any that might have bloomed wilted under the weight of Ecthelion’s jealousy.

As much as Glorfindel hated Gondolin, Ecthelion loved it. Ecthelion soaked up the attention lavished on him as a popular, fashionable lord, a Guard of the King, a Protector of the Realm. He reveled in the way heads turned when he entered a room. Gondolin was Ecthelion’s element, and he nursed the worship for all it was worth. 

Glorfindel would willingly have jumped out of Ecthelion’s spotlight and left the stage without a backwards glance. But it did not work like that, and Ecthelion watched every look of reverence, every word of adoration, every unwanted accolade granted Glorfindel with envious eyes. 

The casualness of Ecthelion’s place in his bed was not what he envisioned when he dreamt of taking a lover, but there were no other options, no other little boy’s peeking out of their boxes to meet his eyes across the wide, judging expanse of Turgon’s halls. The boy who crawled out of his box, to curl up alone in a cold room, still ached from loneliness and wore shame like skin. 

Glorfindel lashed out at the stack of perfectly straight parchments, sending them sweeping through the air to land in a scattered mess. She took everything from him. And now this, _this_. 

Fool to every think he could escape. 

He’d volunteered to be part of Aredhel’s guard. He was the first to jump at the chance, and been praised for his bravery in undertaking the task of Aredhel’s protection so readily. 

Fuck bravery. Fuck honor and duty. Fuck heroes. He never wanted any part of them. He would have laughed in their faces at the ridiculousness of their toy soldier image of him, if his bones didn’t feel like they’d leap from his body, so badly was he shaking inside with anticipation, hope, and fear that this dream too would burn like melting gold on its way down his throat.

He should have known not to hope.

After the other lords filed from the council room, Turgon carefully shut the door and turned to him. Glorfindel had known in that one look that Turgon perceived his designs. Turgon spoke with that mantel of aloof, stern pride he wrapped about himself, as he told Glorfindel he would not be allowed to lead the escort; he would not be allowed out of the valley’s gates. Glorfindel had never come closer to Kinslaying as in that moment.

If he got out of this prison he wouldn’t have come back. He had no intention to, and Turgon knew it. 

Glorfindel had let his hopes get away from him, a thousand daydreams spinning golden tapestries in his head. He’d go to Fingolfin. Why had he ever left? In Barad Eithel there had been those who _saw_ him, who cared: Fingolfin, Fingon, Guilin.

Fingolfin wouldn’t force him to return to Gondolin. Fingolfin loved him –truly loved he— and family always came above obligations or laws for Fingolfin. He could have been free, could have gone home to Hithlum and the pieces of a family that looked at him and saw _Glorfindel_ , not Captain of Gondolin, Lord of the House of the Golden Flower. 

He wasn’t sure he could ever bear to hope again. But no, he would not lose himself to despair. He would not fall into madness behind these prison bars. He would flee to the one escape he’d found. 

Up the twisting paths of the Cirith Thoronath he climbed, until he came to _their_ spot. He camped on the rocky ground, lit a fire, and waited for Rasnim to follow the signal to him. 

A few days spend in the closest thing he’d come to freedom, inhaling Rasnim’s open smiles and honest friendship, before re-shouldering the weight of responsibilities and expectations. Then he drudged down the mountain, snapping the golden chains of conformity back on his wrists, and shrunk himself to fit into between the cage bars.

*

The mountains rose behind them like jutting teeth. To the west, clouds sagged with mist over the River Sirion, and to the south the eaves of Doriath ran into green plains. But it was east Irimë looked. 

Aredhel rode like a loosed spirit escaped from the underworld, high on liberation. Their guard formed a tight ring around them, casting wary eyes over the land, and performing their duties with paranoid commitment.

Irimë called her horse to a skidding stop. She turned to Aredhel as her niece pulled her horse up, loose shingle flying under its hooves. Irimë’s body arched, as if under a lover’s caress, or listening to a distant whisper out of the east. “It has been many years since we visited our estranged friends. Do you remember how close you once were to Celegorm?” 

Aredhel flicked loose hair out of her eyes, and settled a measuring look on her aunt, ignoring the guards urging them not to tarry. “I also remember my last meeting with him.”

“It was only injured Fëanorion pride,” Irimë consoled, though Aredhel looked more indignant than hurt. “But can you think of anything grander than running the wilds with Celegorm as you once did?”

Aredhel narrowed her eyes, “It is a tempting thought, but why do you suggest it? What reason do you have for seeking the Fëanorions?”

“My ladies,” Ecthelion urged his horse between them, attempting to forestall their plans, “our course is west, to Hithlum. The path east is perilous and not fit for a party such as ours.”

Aredhel’s eyes flared, chin jutting out, “You think we cannot walk any path a man might?”

“Nay, my lady, that was not my meaning. Only that our number is small and the Valley of Dreadful Death treacherous and inhabited by many dark creatures,” Ecthelion tried to placate, but the battle was already lost. Aredhel had taken the words as a challenge and would answer them as such.

“I am riding east, to the Fëanorions. You may do as you like.” Aredhel shot her horse forward with a word of ringing command. Irimë was quick on her heels, and the guard had no choice but to follow or lose their charges altogether. Many times the guards attempted to turn them back by words of persuasion or threat of horror, but they would not be swayed. 

Irimë had forsaken Gondolin for Glorfindel’s sake, but she needed to be loved, hungered for it even as a child attaching herself to the ones who lavished it most fiercely upon her. Fingolfin once would have fulfilled this need, but her welcome at Barad Eithel would be cold.

She couldn’t undo the past, but the possibility to start anew with Maglor remained. This time she would show him how she changed. She made mistakes, terrible mistakes, but she was not the sort of person to sink to her knees and lay herself down to death, spirit broken. There had to be a future for her somewhere.

Maglor had broken from her completely, and had made no attempt to mend the damage. Even when she called him in the Palantír from Turgon’s White Tower, he had not answered the one she _knew_ he possessed. But Maglor was ever ready to see the good in people even when there was little to see. She needed someone to see something worth saving in her. She needed it desperately.

If she could only convince Maglor she had truly changed, then she could nurse the flicker of his love into a fire. Maglor loved so fiercely, so passionately. Maybe Maglor could save her from the person she’d become.


	29. Chapter 26

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 26

Year 316 of the First Age, Maglor’s home in Thand Barad, a fortress along the banks of the Great Gelion River

She did not recognize him. Oh, he had the same ink-black hair, and the same grey eyes that swam with a hint of green and a splash of blue. His nose was still perfectly straight, lips as expressive as his voice. But aside from the colors, the familiar planes and ridges, he might as well have been a stranger.

There had always been something vulnerable in his expression when he looked at her, as if she alone had the potential to ruin him or pull him into bliss. She had liked that look. 

She would look back on this moment –after Himring burned, and Fingolfin and Fingon joined the line of dead kings, bodies stacked higher and higher, and she wrapped herself in sheep’s wool to keep out the cold where once fox fir had adorned her—and know it for the moment everything changed. It hadn’t been Fingolfin sending her to Gondolin with a few placating words far short of love, it wasn’t Glorfindel’s mouth pressed so hard and cruel against hers; it was Maglor’s apathy towards her existence. 

Later, much later, she would understand how very, very far Maglor Fëanorion had drifted from her, so far above her that the tips of her tip-toes could not reach him. Nothing would pull him back into her arms.

At the moment though, she had not realized it was over. She flushed with life after the dangerous journey through the Valley of Dreadful Death. Though they lost their guard, they came out unscathed. She was surer than ever that her love for Maglor could save her. 

He received her in private, which furthered her hope. If he despised her, would he not seize the chance to publically humiliate her? Yet he had had attendants bring her to a private chamber, away from the bustle and watchful eyes of his Great Hall.

She was pleased with the home he’d fashioned for himself along the swiftly flowing Greater Gelion. From the flat river valley, the fortress pushed up shoulders of the blue quartz the Blue Mountains were known for. The lands rolled rich and green with rye and barley fields, while sheep and cattle grazed lazily in the pastures. 

The fortress Maglor had raised was a sensible balance between Gondolin’s decadence –confident in the safety of the Encircling Mountains—and Barad Eithel’s barred teeth. She could see herself mistress here quite easily.

Now all she needed to do was crack this mask (for it must be a mask; she knew Maglor so well) and get at the tenderhearted man beneath. “It has been too long,” she offered him a warm smile, stepping forward. She was careful not to play her old games for control. She did not posture and demand explanations for his abandonment. She would show him how she had changed.

She held out her hand, ready for him to take it. He did not move from the place a bay window silhouetted him. The stillness in his face accentuated the high sweep of his cheekbones, and unsmiling mouth. 

She dropped her hand, and licked her lips. “I know we did not part on the best of terms last we spoke, but I…” She faltered under the apathy in those eyes, but pressed on, “I know I made mistakes. I hurt you, and others. Forgive me, I did not see.” She exposed her softened neck to him. See, see! Even my pride, my stiff neck, I forsake for you!) “But Maglor, I still love you.” She might as well be on her knees, so fully had she humbled herself before him, laying her heart naked and shivering without the shield of her pride into the lake of his hand.

He observed her in silence, as if she were some strange creature pinned on a board like a stretched butterfly for his perusal. “Do you know why I came to you in Hithlum after the Ice? It was because you were one of the few ladies of Finwë’s House who stood by their husbands, sons, brothers, and lovers, choosing Exile over the comfort of Valinor. You have ever been dauntless where others fell into despair.” 

Her heart was a bird taking flight in her chest. He loved her, he loved—

“You are also the most selfish, petty, spiteful, and rapacious person I have ever met.” There was no malice in the words, only fact. They chilled her all the more for their lack of heat. Fire she could have met with fire, but this indifference? Hate was the sister of love; they knew each other like bosom friends, but indifference was love’s polar opposite. At least with hate one had to feel. Indifference was the absence of feeling. 

“You say you love me,” he continued, “but if I ever loved you, it was in another life.” 

Something pushed its way up her stomach, passed like acid through her lungs. She swallowed convulsively to keep it inside. She didn’t want to hear anymore, but he didn’t stop. He ripped her to sheds as easily as if his words were whips, “I don’t hate you. I think I almost did for a time. But you see Irimë, if I hated you, than you would have won. If I hated you, my hatred and bitterness would have consumed me until you were all I could see. There would have been no room for anything else. Even my love for my brothers would have been diminished, slowly consumed by the greed of hatred. I could not let that happen.”

He stepped forward; the orange light of a sun setting over the mountains cut a plane of gold in his face, and caught in the heavy gloss of black hair. He was breathtaking. Long fingers, not harsh but not tender, took her chin, and forced her eyes back to his. “I could almost thank you. I am unsure if I would have been able to endure the cruelty of these lands if I first had not survived you.”

“You nearly broke me. I almost lost my faith in the world, my ability to love without bonds of control and vies for dominance. But I did not. I can still love in spite of you.” He released her chin, and there, in the sharpness of the gesture might have lingered a hint at rage, but if it crept beneath that mask of nothingness, than it was weak indeed.

“You shall find no place in my bed, or welcome by my side. So what will you do now, Irimë Finwëion?”

A mouthful of bile defeated her best efforts. She pressed a fist to her mouth, and took a deep gulp of air once her stomach stopped rolling. His eyes picked up a hint of something she never wanted. Not from him, not from anyone. Pity.

“I cannot go back to Gondolin,” she would not cry, not for him. “You may think me the lowest of beings, and indeed, I have seen myself for a miserable creature indeed. But I love my son, and I made a promise. I promised to myself that I would never force my presence on him again.”

“What have you done to the boy?” the words were like a shock of heat and displaced air before the growl of thunder. 

“I…I don’t…” The idea of confessing that Glorfindel was _their_ son had never been further from her mind. She could never tell him now, not when any chance of knowing his son was lost to him, cut off by secrets and high mountains. She turned her face from him, “Nothing that can be undone.”

“I should have stopped you, but I just wanted you _gone_ from my life so _badly_ —” He sucked in a breath. “Hells, Irimë, how could you hurt him?”

“I don’t know. I am sorry,” she choked.

“It is not me you should be begging forgiveness from.”

“He will never forgive me. I thought…but maybe I should go back, try again. Maybe I can—”

Maglor snatched her arm, the grip far from gentle, “No. You are not going near him.”

“But where can I go? I find no welcome from you, and have no doubt our escort was quick to report to Turgon of our ‘foolishness,’ and Turgon would have informed Fingolfin in the Palantír.” Irimë spun out from Maglor’s hand to pace a line across the floor.

“You are not going back to Gondolin. It does not matter what Fingolfin thinks, he will not turn you away,” Maglor said without a drop of mercy.

“Does not matter what he thinks!” Her voice skirted the edge of a shriek. “He is going to ask me what I was thinking coming here, and he knows me too well for me to use a flimsy excuse like protecting Aredhel. I have never been able to lie to him when he gives me _that look_.”

“You should have thought of that before coming here,” Maglor crossed his arms. 

“I _wont_ go back to Fingolfin. He will know, and then, and then…I will not be able to bear it if he looked upon me with revulsion.” Irimë wrapped her arms about her stomach. Her trembled at the imagined look in her brother’s eyes after he wrung out _why_ she would seek the Fëanorion, even at the risk of a perilous journey. Oh yes, she could see how well he would take her confession of being her own nephew’s lover!

She said, because she was desperate, “If you do not let me stay here, I will go straight back to Gondolin! I swear it Maglor!”

His mouth twisted in contempt, “You think to blackmail _me_? I can have you dragged all the way to Hithlum with an armed escort, your hands bound in chains, with a snap of my fingers. Do you think anyone in my own keep would gainsay me?”

Her mouth trembled. But she would not cry, even in the face of his cruelty. “Please,” the word strangled as if two heavy hands wrapped around her throat. “Please Maglor, let me stay. If you ever loved me—” then, when she perceived that was the wrong tactic, “if you have mercy in your heart, do not send me to Fingolfin.” She stepped closer, though he stood cold as a statue, “I will prove to you I have changed.”

His lip curled and he gave her his back –straight as a sword and beautifully proud— and dismissed her pleas as easily as brushing away a speck of lint.

But she was relentless. The alternative was too ghastly to contemplate. It felt as if she begged for her very life, “Do you remember, in Tirion, when I promised to follow you into whatever end? Even in the pursuit of your Oath? Even if you cannot love me, can we not be friends? Are we not family?”

Once she knew every string to pluck, and wrapped them tighter and tighter until he dangled from chains of shame and guilt. She pulled the cords, and it had been so easy then, so very easy to hurt him, and make him follow the yank of his leash into her bed.

She had tried to destroy him and thought it a great love. She didn’t deserve the refuge she begged of him. She should be grateful for his pity. But though she had no right to more, she had always been greedy. Especially for his love. She didn’t know how to surrender. From the beginning she pursued him, and her love was as obstinate as ever.

He spun around, the heavy material of his tunic snapping against his thighs. The set of his jaw was strong and sharp, and he looked lordlier than she had ever seen him with eyes like morning stars, “You beg refuge in my hall?”

“Yes.”

“I turn aside none seeking shelter lest they be servant of the Enemy. But you are an able-bodied woman, and shall earn your keep. I suggest you sell your fine silks and purchase more durable wear before reporting to my steward. He will find you some employment. Perhaps with the laundresses?”

She stared at him, open mouthed. “But I am your _blood!_ The daughter of Finwë!” 

“Then be on your way, daughter of Finwë. I shall send a messenger ahead for Fingolfin to expect you.”

Her eyes pled with Maglor for mercy, but he remained unmoved. He _wanted_ her to refuse him. He wanted her pride to win out.

Pride used to mean—everything. 

Pride was the mark of a Noldo. Pride was the crown under which all other virtues sat. Pride was the ore that held all the others, and with its strength produced steel. Pride was the measure by which the Noldor judged their self-worth and the joy of a work well done. 

But Pride, bloated into arrogance, was the reason for the holes in her chest once filled with the warmth of another’s love. Pride was no stone, but a mountain in her path that she had failed and failed and failed to overcome.

She swallowed her pride. It cut, glass-edged on the way down. A laundress? A common servant woman? Could she bear such a fate? 

She straightened her shoulders. “Very well.” 

Her answer did not please him, but he did not withdraw the offer made. He left her. She stared after his retreating back and promised herself this degradation would not be forever. Somehow, someway, she would get him back. Irimë Finwëion had always fought for what she wanted, too fiercely it might be said, but she didn’t know how to concede defeat.

*

The news traveled fast. No lands had a swifter circuit of communication than the Fëanorions.’ Twenty-three Seeing Stones Fëanor made, and every one of those his people took with them into Exile. Half of them were the experimental ones he played with before he made the eleven that would conquer mountains and oceans and spread their eye over hundreds of leagues. Four of these stones Maedhros gifted Fingolfin with the crown of gold. A mighty gift, sacrificed to mend their peoples. The remaining seven were kept each by one of Fëanor’s sons.

Of the lesser stones, a son of Fëanor always carried one on his person. They were small, dark blue orbs polished like glass. One rested now in the cup of Maglor’s palm as he called his brothers’ Celegorm and Curufin out of the east. Great distances the smaller stones could cover, but Maglor could not look into its blue-eye and find Fingolfin in Hithlum, or glimpse the sea crashing against the rocks, or seek out Finrod in his hidden city.

Aredhel, fearless, foolish girl, had gone ridding alone, even to the very borders of her cousins’ lands. She was lost. No sign of a skirmish yet, but that did not mean the Enemy’s minions had not taken her, or that she was not dead, a corpse lying broken behind some boulder that they wouldn’t find until the rot set in once flawless flesh and the crows finished picking out eyes that had burned like wildfire.

Irimë dreaded the news reaching Fingolfin, but it could not be held off forever. The only thing Fingolfin had asked of her was Aredhel’s protection, and Irimë had failed spectacularly. She thought Aredhel would be safe in the security of the Fëanorions’ borders. She shouldn’t have left her. If she had been less focused on herself, less selfish…

Aredhel was one of the few people she had left. If they could only find her… Until they stumbled upon her dead body, Irimë refused to give up hope.

Maglor gathered a search party to swell the ranks of Celegorm and Curufin’s people, but it was several days hard ride between Maglor’s lands and his brothers.’ Amras and Amrod’s lands were closer, but the twins had joined Caranthir in putting down an Orc attack come down like cowards out of the Blue Mountains to stab the Fëanorions’ in the back. Of course the Fëanorions had been waiting for them. Nothing passed unseen in their realms.

“I am going with you,” Irimë said to Maglor’s back as he snapped out commands, assembling a group of riders and supplies.

He heard her, and turned. If he cared for her he would argue for her safety, but he did not. “If that is your wish. As long as you do not slow my riders down.”

Irimë’s jaw set. “I can ride as well as any of your men.”

“Do you own a horse?”

She flushed, and resented him for it. She had had to sell her horse, unable to afford the stabling fee on a spinner’s wagers (at least she was not a laundress). 

The last four months had been grueling, but surprisingly satisfying. She had never taken more pride in her work than she did spinning the thread that would be woven into soldiers’ cloaks, clothing, and blankets. She looked back on her years in Gondolin as wasted and self-indulgent. If she had stayed with Fingolfin at least she would have assisted the war-effort. But she was back where she belonged, helping her family defeat their Great Enemy.

She lifted her chin. “I can rent one easily enough from the stables.”

He nodded curtly and advised her to hurry in her preparations as they would leave within the hour. And that was that. He turned back to his men –to more important concerns. 

Four months and nothing had changed. Not for lack of trying on her part. Despite the length of time apart her skills in seduction had not rusted, but it was rather hard to seduce stone. Again and again she broke herself upon the rocks of his disinterest and casual dismissal. But she made her bed and could do nothing but lie in it.

Celegorm and Curufin joined Maglor’s party in the wilds. The great hound Huan ran at the heels of Celegorm’s horse. The brothers slid like water from their horses’ backs and clasped arms with Maglor.

Irimë’s eyes fixed on Celegorm. Finally, some hope. He would find Aredhel, had he not loved her in Tirion? Celegorm would not rest until Aredhel was safe. Irimë took determined steps forward, her ridding dress swirling around her ankles. 

Celegorm turned eyes the deep green of a forest on her. “What business do _you_ have in our lands?” he demanded. She smelt the leather he was so generously clad in and the sunlight clinging to his hair. For all he appeared the epitome of a Noldo –haughty pride and quick temper—a wildness that reminded her of Wood-elves lingered like the forest on his skin.

“I traveled with Aredhel out of Gondolin,” she answered with slitted eyes. She’d never liked Celegorm, but worse still was Curufin who stood like a bared, menacing blade at his brother’s shoulder.

Maglor wasn’t interested in her trivial rivalries with every son of Fëanor but himself, and said, eyes and voice all for his brothers leaving none for her: “We had no sign of Aredhel. Perhaps you will have better luck with your beasts, Celegorm.”

Celegorm did not deny his brother’s request, but it took some days for the feelers he sent out to bring him anything of significance. 

Crows groomed the waves of cornsilk hair falling from Celegorm’s head, mice crawled up his arms to whisper their secrets into his ears, and a doe padded tame as the hound at his side up to him. It was disturbing to see this side of her nephew: the way he cradled the little beasts in his palms, cooed like a woman to a shy fox, and sung a bird’s song as naturally as Elvish. She’d always thought him a bit of a brute.

But then something in Celegorm’s face changed, hardening, all the warmth leaching from the sharp bones. Just once, harsh and foul, he cursed, before even that display was ruthlessly crushed and he turned a gaze that appeared lazy in the indifferent tilt of his eyes upon them. “Good luck on your search, brother,” he tossed over the slope of his shoulder as he made a fierce line for his horse. 

“Where are you going?” Irimë jumped up from the log she’d perched uncomfortably on. “What about Aredhel?”

Celegorm stroked a hand over his horse’s nose, and tickled its ears, “As I said: Good luck.”

“She was coming for _you_. And you don’t even care? She could be dead!”

Celegorm shot her a cold look, “She is as good as. I do not scamper after traitors.” He tossed a leg over his mount’s back, the leather of his jerkin creaked, hair swinging indolently around his closed face. With only a stiff nod to Maglor, he spun his horse’s hooves towards home. 

*

Celegorm valued loyalty above any other attribute. His was a strange brand of loyalty by the mark of Elves because he had no loyalty to race. He did not see Elven-blood on his hands and think ‘kin’ or ‘unforgivable.’ Those Elves were not kin; they weren’t even his people, and he would slay even one of the sons of Fëanor’s followers if they stood between him and protecting his family.

Loyalty to family was the sacredest of bonds. Celegorm would cut off his right arm, rip out his heart, sell his soul to Morgoth, before he betrayed a brother.

The Oath bound them, but loyalty drove him.

Irimë, that cow, looked at him as if he were an Orc. She did not understand, but he could care less. 

He turned to Irimë before whistling his mount into a gallop, and said with the finality of a fallen sword through an Orc’s neck: “I do not scamper after traitors.” And then he was gone, Curufin a hungry shadow at his side, his brother’s face stretched into a smile of teeth and dark pleasure. Celegorm was well aware Curufin would be pleased Aredhel was no longer a lead bar across his back.

Celegorm would not say he would never think of Aredhel Ar-Feiniel again. But he held loyalty next to godliness, and she had proved one-too-many times that she had none.

When he first heard Aredhel awaited him in his lands, come off her golden tower to seek him out, he considered offering her one last chance. He took his time coming home though; his brother Caranthir had need of him. But then Maglor contacted him in the Palantír. Aredhel had been lost, perhaps captured or killed by Orcs, and Celegorm rushed home. 

He sent out ravens, falcons, and sparrows to spy out the land for traces of her. He asked the fox, squirrel, and the mice of the field to seek her scent. He charmed the deer and bear to search deep into forests and dens for a glimpse of her white raiment. They returned chattering tales of acorns and cool tree shadows, cawing of curious clouds and mist that befuddled their minds and twisted them in circles. They snuffled into his palms for nuts and berries as they told him of their slyness, their cleverness in seeking holes in the strange enchantments. 

He stroked their coats and feathered bodies, and complemented their hard work, their endurance, their loyalty. They told him of perpetual twilight under branches so tightly entwined the sunlight never warmed the ground. They told him of a snow-glad two-legs and another two-legs mantled in the black metal of the Earth. They told him, in their own way, of Aredhel’s faithlessness. She took this other man between her thighs, but that was who Aredhel was and Celegorm wouldn’t have cared. What Celegorm could not forgive was her willingness to take this man to mate when she had sworn, in Valinor, to wed no man, and that if she ever _did_ chose a husband, it would be Celegorm.

Celegorm swept Aredhel Ar-Feiniel from his heart. She betrayed him for the last time. In Nan Elmoth she dwelt now, the wife of Eöl, that Sun-shy, lurker. She could rot in Nan Elmoth for all he cared.

*

Celebrimbor’s uncles paced like caged animals around the room –well not Maedhros; Maedhros did not stalk about like a ravenous wolf. He had a graceful, swinging stride that made one think he’d break out in dance any moment. 

Celebrimbor fiddled with the ring looped around his neck on a simple silver chain, as was his habit during highly-charged family disputes. 

The ring was his first. She reminded him of Fëanor’s hair, shinning like black shouldn’t be able to shine in the light of a forge fire, of his father’s lips pressed into his temple, of the way his father’s hand dwarfed his as it guided him through his first quench. She was his first, and like all firsts, he ruined her. 

Grandiose ambition cost him. His father and grandfather had shared a knowing look when he pulled out sketches filled with not-quite-straight lines, and a ring design far too advanced for his armature skills. But they let him have his head, stepping back to let him learn by failing. Celebrimbor loved them for it.

His thumb rubbed over the badly twisted braids of her band. He had been split between gold and silver, and overly confident in his skill. He kept her with him always, pressed against his chest like a kiss. A remainder of the cost of letting his ambitious go unchecked, and what happened when overconfidence overcame his skill.

When Curufin finally swept into the room, he brought the family gathering to completion. Celegorm jumped Caranthir in the race to the first word. Celegorm had been in a fey mood every since he rode into Himring, horse kicking up mud, leathers covered in the grime of the road, and the look of a wounded animal in his eyes. He pretended he couldn’t give two figs about Aredhel, but it was not so easy to cut out one’s heart and box it. 

“I want to know why you didn’t tell us that _bitch_ had latched herself like the leech she is to Maglor?” Celegorm’s words were lances aimed at Maedhros who kept watch on the Northern borders with Maglor.

Maedhros answered without hurry, “There was nothing you could have done.”

“You are fine with this?” Caranthir emerged from behind Celegorm who stood like barred-fanged wolf in the middle of the room. Caranthir’s dark brows knit, mouth a sullen line as he jammed himself into a wooden chair. Its clawed feet scrapped against the stone floor. 

“No, of course not.”

“But you did not tell us,” Amras looked up from the chessboard the twins amused themselves with, for all appearances only paying the discussion half a mind. But no one mistook their apparent absorption with a game as a sign they weren’t listening intently. “None of us would be here if Celegorm and Curufin had not seen her and told the others.”

“None of you should be here at all,” Maedhros said. “If you have a problem with Maglor’s choices, take it up with him. Don’t hold secret meetings in _my home_ behind his back.”

“You know why we cannot do that,” Curufin dismissed. “He would react no better to one of us telling him how to order his life, than any of us would.”

“Exactly,” Maedhros returned. “Plotting behind his back will only stiffen his neck if he discovers it.”

“This is more important than his pride,” Celegorm said and locked with eyes with Maedhros’ in a challenge. 

Maedhros arched a cool brow back. “There is no love lost between Irimë and me. But charging in will not rid Maglor of her.”

Caranthir’s lip curled, “Maglor would never let a woman come between us. I do not see why we have to tip-toe around.” He shot a glare at Celegorm, blaming him for this meeting when Caranthir would have marched in to tear shreds in Irimë. He was ever-ready to choose the bluntest course. If he said something, he meant it. If he wanted to say something, he said it.

“He would not,” Maedhros agreed. “But his heart is not in peril. I spoke to him of her.”

“What did he say?” Amrod’s eyes came up at his twin’s question. He let Amras speak for the both of them, as usual. 

Maedhros tapped his lips with his fingers, and crossed one long leg over his knee. “We spoke long ago, shortly after Father’s banishment from Tirion—”

“What?” Amras jolted. 

Maedhros lifted his brow, “We all knew he had a secret lover.”

“ _Her_?” Curufin sneered. “ _What_ was he thinking?”

Maedhros waved the words away. “We were all different people then. But even when we spoke in our youth, she had no hold on him. He had thoroughly purged her poison from his veins.”

“Then what is he doing tolerating her in his home?” Caranthir’s guarded eyes observed his elder brother’s face. 

Maedhros paused, as if examining his words one-by-one to see how they stacked up before loosing them: “He came to me shortly after she took up residence in his halls. I had, of course, heard of her arrival. He said he offered her a place in his halls half in hope she would refuse it and never darken his doorstep again, but also half out of a desire for others to never discover what once lay between them. He feared the secret she carried if he returned her to Fingolfin. I do not believe he himself knew which he wanted least: her presence in his home, or the folly of his youth laid bare before those he respects.”

Caranthir said, “I do not care that he was deceived in Valinor. I do not want her near him _now_.”

“We should invite them both here,” Amras said. “She will soon turn-tail, and swear off Fëanorions for good.” His hands brushed over the white queen, a crafty look in his eyes as he spun plots to drive Irimë into the hills.

“She will not be so easily lulled from Thand Barad,” Caranthir rose and stalked through the room, his erratic movements the antithesis of Maedhros’ elegance.

Celegorm crossed his arms. “I will ride to Thand Barad with the dawn. Maglor will hear from my own lips that we don’t give a fuck about who he fucked in Valinor. He will send her packing within the hour.” 

“Tell him, by all means,” Maedhros said. “But do not expect our regard to be the only one he cares not to fall in.”

Celegorm’s jaw tightened. “Then what more is to be done?”

“We shall bide our time, observe, and trust our brother’s judgment. Maglor is no fool. Yes, we all wish to protect him, but we must not underestimate his own perceptiveness. He is far from blind to the ugliness lurking beneath her fair face.” His judgment given, Maedhros rose, graceful as a cat unfolding, and retreated to a spacious, glass-paned window. 

Quietly, like the silent spectator he’d been throughout the argument, Celebrimbor followed Maedhros to the window. He watched the light crawl into the sharp angles of his uncle’s face, hollowing his cheeks as it swept broad strokes over high cheekbones and creamy skin.

May women sighed over his uncle’s beauty, and many men glowered with envy of not only his shapely form, but the razor-fine mind beneath that handsome face, and the feyness of his sword upon the field, striking such fear in the Enemy’s ranks that some had been known to flee at the mere sight of his distinctive hair whipping like a banner of wrath behind him. Those Elves would continue to think Maedhros invincible because they never saw him when those silver eyes couldn’t see them back.

Celebrimbor remembered sitting beside his uncle during one of those fire-red nights of the Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle as it had been named. Fire had heralded the Black One’s stirring, and out of Angband had erupted flames. The Ard-galen burned for days after, a continuance red-haze in the Northern sky. 

Celebrimbor’s company was ambushed by one of the many packs of Orcs sneaking into the Gap of Maglor. He feared they would be overwhelmed, but Maedhros’ heavier force, all seasoned warriors, came down on the Orcs’ unprotected backs and cut through their ranks like sickles balding a wheat field.

That night, after they cleaned the black blood off their swords and slapped down a hasty camp as dusk saddled the sky, Celebrimbor uncurled from his bedroll and approached his uncle perched sleepless upon a jutting boulder. Silver eyes wandered, taking in everything, but seeing nothing. It was one of the bad nights.

Softly, taking care not to touch Maedhros’ unnaturally still form, he slipped beside him on the rock, keeping a measured distance between them. Maedhros did not like to be touched when Angband haunted him. 

They sat like that a time, Celebrimbor humming an old lullaby his father sung, one Maedhros grew up hearing. There was little anyone could do for Maedhros when the past imprisoned him. 

Celebrimbor had been there in the beginning, when they had yet to learn the signs. They tried to touch Maedhros, pull him back to the present with a soft hand, a shake, a slap. They tried it all, and gentle words too, but those had no power over Maedhros’ mind. The touches though, they worked, if success was Maedhros falling into a fit on the floor, begging and screaming for them to stop. Stop hurting him, stop touching him. At other times, a touch would provoke another kind of violent reaction, and one would find themselves flat on their back, Maedhros’ powerful body pressed into theirs, eyes feral and unseeing as he played out some scene in his head as the one he pinned choked and thrashed under the pressure of his hand about their throat.

Celebrimbor’s fingers trailed to his neck at the memory. He’d truly thought he was going to die, murdered by an uncle who couldn’t see him. But Fingon heard his struggle –Fingon was never far from Maedhros’ side—and pulled his uncle off him. Maedhros hadn’t been able to look at Celebrimbor for days, not until the bruises in the shape of fingers faded. 

Maedhros had begged, begged as Celebrimbor never thought his proud, impervious uncle would ever do. He made them promise not to interfere with the episodes again, unless it was an emergency. Maedhros didn’t expect the incidents to pass with time. It was then they fully began to understand that some wounds never healed, and some things that had been done to a _fëa_ could be lived through but never forgotten.

Celebrimbor hummed softly as Maedhros struggled in the jaws of the past, and hoped, with all the fury of his helplessness, that Maedhros could hear him know he was not alone.

Maedhros shifted, a small displacement of lean muscles, but it was enough to alert Celebrimbor of the attack’s passing. Slowly, counting five seconds between every inch, his hand crossed the distance to Maedhros’ back. Just his fingertips at first, and when Maedhros accepted them without a flitch, his palm joined them to rest on the curve of spine.

“You saved my life today,” he said, to fill the silence, to soak away some of the memories. It wasn’t as if he needed to remind Maedhros of his actions; their eyes had met across a field of Orcs and all that was needed to be said was said with that one look. But Celebrimbor was painfully aware of the many Elven bodies laying about them; some with too-light breathing to be asleep, keen ears focused on the lord they loved, but were also half-terrified, half-in-awe of. “Not only mine. You will have more than a few new admirers after today’s rescue,” he said it teasingly, and on another day, in another place, it would have earned a crooked smile.

But with the aftertaste of sulfur and vicious laughter in his mouth, Maedhros rasped: “There is nothing worthy admiration in war. Better they flee and save what little is left of their lives.”

Celebrimbor wished his usually vigilant uncle had chosen a wiser time, a more select company. The blame lay with Celebrimbor though. He berated himself for letting his anxiety over Maedhros’ condition override his sense.

He remembered that night vividly as he watched his uncle’s eyes slip in and out of reality as he stared unseeing at the fortress he had built below him. His uncle was the strongest person he had ever met, even more than his grandfather, Fëanor. Fëanor could have survived Angband, but he hadn’t had to. Maedhros had. And it forged him into something impossibly fragile, and breathtakingly resilient. 

Elven _fëar_ weren’t created to endure what Maedhros endured at Morgoth’s hands, and yet he had. He survived on sheer will alone, and refused to give Morgoth the pleasure of breaking him. No, Morgoth _had_ broken him, but hadn’t destroyed him.

“How do you bear it?” Celebrimbor hadn’t meant to release the words, but they slipped out.

Maedhros’ turned form his perusal, no surprise on his face to see his nephew standing at his shoulder. But Maedhros’ mind was off in its own world, running an unseen track, for he answered: “You take the things they say and release them, just so,” he filled his diaphragm with a deep breath, before releasing in a steady exhale. “Let their slights and crimes against you fall like rainwater against the window pane. All the while you sit on the opposite side, and watch them fall feebly before you. Let their anger at your indifference overwhelm them and cloud their judgment.”

Celebrimbor hoped his father and the more hot-tempered of his uncles weren’t listening in as Maedhros called their efforts ‘feeble.’ But as Maedhros’ eyes flickered back to darkness, he understood his uncle hadn’t referred to the recent argument, but a darker, meaner past.

Quickly, before the shadows could consume Maedhros, Celebrimbor asked, “You are confident he does not love her?”

Maedhros’ hand trailed against the glass pane, but though he was silent a long moment, his gaze stayed firmly in the present. “He does not. It is a mercy.”

“Because she does not deserve him.” It wasn’t a question. Though he knew Irimë barely at all, he knew enough to confidently say she could never deserve Maglor. 

“Because love hurts worse than anything in the world. That is its price for being the closest we ever come to divinity,” Maedhros’ reply was soft as starlight.

Celebrimbor had never known love. But Maedhros’ love for Fingon had once blazed all over his face, like the sun grew under his skin whenever he looked at Fingon. But the love was coupled with loss now, after Angband. If Maedhros still loved Fingon as he once had, he kept that love pressed tight like a fist against his heart, hoarding what was left of it as he hoarded his love for his family.

As much as Maedhros loved his family, Celebrimbor wasn’t sure he could still love a lover. Not like that lover would want. Morgoth had stolen so much. 

And yet they went on; they endured. Even Maedhros –who had been so touched by Darkness he would never escape its cold hand upon his flesh—could still smile those crooked smiles (rare, so rare, but there) and love. He could love in spite of the horrors he’d endured. 

The House of Fëanor still shouted its challenge to Morgoth, daring the Destroyer to dash himself upon the pikes of their lances, and let the fire of their vengeance consume him. They would spit out his bones and stomp them into ash until Morgoth was utterly annihilated, and even the whisper of his name had been wiped from the histories of the world.


	30. Chapter 27

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 27

Year 472 of the First Age, shortly after the Battle of Unnumbered Tears

They said love passed. Given enough time, everyone got over it. Not if the object of her affection was too close to forget but too far to touch. 

In the beginning, Irimë schemed ways to come upon him alone and draw his fingers to her longing flesh. She pretended their love was not a love-letter long turned to ash. But she was good at that: lying to herself. It had been a fantasy played out in her head that the fingers slipping out from her ever-reaching ones weren’t accompanied by a mouth twisted in disgust. She told herself he needed a little more time, just a little more to see what a new, shinny woman she’d become. 

It took over a century running after his love, before understanding it would never turn to look back at her. 

One could not live within Maglor’s orbit, and not fall in love with the man he’d become. But his love was always beyond her reach. It was the scent of his skin leaving a room at her approach. It was the flash of ink-black hair on the other side of the garden; she ran fast enough to split her heart, but never caught more than a glimpse of black, and the sway of a branch swung back into place. It was the smile on his face ever turned away from her, given to others, so many others, for he had lost none his allure. His light had grown like a muscle built through struggle against her day after day to become powerful and sleek with endurance.

(You no longer love me. I died to you. My feet long to walk the paths you tread, to stand in the warmth of your sun, and feel your hot kiss against my skin. I told you I would never leave you; I said it when I was a vain, spiteful creature that did not deserve to hear your laughter. I tell you again, now I have learned what it feels like to weep from love, to hunger for the place beside you in bed. I tell you again: until the world breaks I shall never be parted from you, though you send me from your side, my heart will still turn facing yours, and not even the Eternal Darkness can pull it back into my chest).

Her love would never be returned, nor ever pass her lips again. Nor should it, for she could never hope to deserve him. She had used him like a punching sack. She torn pieces out of him and tried to fit a horse-bit into his mouth. She tried to break the beauty out of him rather than let it run free outside her control. She was a miserable creature who was hopelessly in love with something far far too good for her. 

If only she could look back at their time as lovers without regret. But she could feel no joy, forever cringing from the wretched thing she had been. Her only dreams now were to take a measure of his pain onto herself, to ease even a fraction of the burdens weighing him down: his fears for his brothers and people, the pain he bore the Oath with, the ever-sharp slice of grief. He was a thousand times too good for this world.

She hoped they could have become friends of a sort. At the least that she was no longer a burden. But it was impossible to forge even something as light as friendship when all trust had been destroyed.

She threaded her fingers through her foster-daughter’s* hair. It served as a painful reminded of Glorfindel’s. She deserved to remember. The aching, empty spaces in her womb were her just deserts for what she’d done. And this, she bent to kiss Lalauro’s shoulder through the thin cotton of the child’s nightdress, was her redemption.

It started with Erestor. He had been a soul, like Glorfindel’s, withdrawing into itself to hang about the corners of eyes like a ghost, an uncertain shadow. 

“I shall be watching you,” Maglor said to her, his eyes promised the cut of his blade if she ruined this boy too. He hadn’t wanted her near Erestor, but she meet Erestor on an afternoon in Himring’s garden that started out as any other, but ended with the beginning of her salvation. “One wrong word, one plot spun using him as a tool, one selfish step, and I shall teach you regret like you cannot imagine.”

But before the threat came the mercy. This one last chance. Don’t you hurt this child, not this one too. She was so very careful with Erestor. She poured all the love that hurt like knifes in her chest to shower upon the child because she could never forget that this, _this_ , was what Glorfindel had always needed from her and she had ever withheld.

She rose from the bed, cradling Lalauro’s sleeping form, and retrieved a tortoise shell comb. It was a small luxury, one of the few items she brought from Gondolin not sold for coin. 

She settled on the bed and ran the comb through the knots in Lalauro’s hair. The fine gowns she once wore would have had little purpose here in this rough existence. Where would she wear silk and pearls to now? It was almost amusing to remember how much store she once put in appearances, but too painful to laugh, so she turned the thought aside and pulled the wool of her shawl closer about her shoulders.

She worked at the tangled mat of Lalauro’s hair. Erestor had done his best to look out for the girl, but he was a child himself, and had duties outside of childrearing to attend to. She wished she could have kept Erestor too, he reminded her bleakly of the child her poisonous ‘love’ had turned Glorfindel into, but Erestor had his own father. Lalauro was an orphan and needed a mother now her own had faded from the grief of her husband’s death. Lalauro would be the daughter she never had, and she would be the mother she should have been. Redemption was a bitter-sweet wine in her mouth.

*

Year 506 of the First Age, Forest of Doriath

Doriath falling was inconceivable to the Sindar. It had stood since before the sun and moon’s rising, before the Enemy and his enemies the Noldor returned from the West with the ravenous hound of Death on their heels. Melian’s veil of enchantment had encircled their borders so long the Sindar believed Doriath impenetrable even after she fled.

Maedhros had known the Sindar weren’t prepared for war. Oh, they shut themselves in the deep caverns of Menegroth when the clear notes of the Noldor’s horns crossed their borders, but mentally, they were feeble. Too long they languished behind their protections. They had hidden from both the horrors of war and its conditioning.

The Noldor made no attempt to disguise their coming. It was hardly necessary after Maedhros sent messages months ago demanding Dior hand over the Silmaril (but requested first; it had been a request before it became a demand, and then a threat. But in the end the wording hadn’t mattered).

Maedhros wanted the Sindar to hear his host’s approach. He wanted their blood to turn to milk in their veins. He was in no hurry. No one was coming to save the Sindar. The Sindar had never come to anyone else’s aid.

Winter froze the lands. If nothing else, hunger would induce the Sindar to stand and fight. The Noldor pillaged the land, and fed their army with what they scavenged. But the River Esgalduin, which flowed under the Stone Bridge before the gates of Menegroth, was not yet frozen over. It could still be used as a weapon of war, and Maedhros had always been a brilliant strategist.

He ordered his soldiers to lay down their swords and take up shovels. Just upriver of the caves’ entrance, he built a dam. It was no great task for a nation of engineers that pushed towers and battlements into the sky, but it was a tedious one. But Maedhros did not rest while his men shoveled earth and diverted a mighty river.

Maedhros was ruthless. His mercy had been scraped away in Angband. It was this coldblooded approach to war that set his enemies trembling in their boots at the sight of him. Now the Sindar wrote their names on his list of enemies. 

The smoke thickened the air as fires ate through the Sindar’s beloved forest. They were carefully controlled fires, tactically placed to clear the woods around the gates and set a perimeter up around the Noldor’s camps so no Sindar archers could sneak out of Menegroth’s backdoors and ran death down upon them. 

If the Sindar had a real reason to fight, the burnt woods might have stirred the fires of their rage against the Noldor. But many of the Sindar cared little for the Silmaril Dior expected them to die for. Some even hated it and blamed it for the death of King Thingol and the loss of their most prized pearls: Melian and Lúthien. When the heralds proclaimed Maedhros’ mercy in mighty voices that rang in the deep chambers of Menegroth, more than a few Sindar forsook their king and escaped the caves.

In later years the sons of Fëanor were remembered as monsters, but now there was but one Kinslaying in distant Valinor, far from these Elves’ eyes. They trusted the words of fellow Elves. Ruthless as Maedhros might be, let it never be said he ever broke a vow. The Sindar found the herald’s words to be true, and after a thorough search, lest any attempt to smuggle the Silmaril out, those Sindar who wished were free to walk unharmed from Doriath. 

But more stood by their king and refused to flee their lands. For these stubborn, but ignoble Elves who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a thief, Maedhros took off his gloves. 

When the day of the battle came, it was of the Fëanorions’ choosing. The booming roar of the water’s surge as the dam collapsed, echoed off the trees and carried into the caverns of Menegroth. The river’s channel had been re-directed right up to the gates of Menegroth. After the flood waters toppled trees and the abandoned topside settlements of the Sindar, it slammed into the Dwarven-wrought, near impenetrable doors of Menegroth, and thrust them open with the force of a flood’s rage. The raging waters shot like blood through an artery into the exposed caves. 

It took weeks for the flood waters to recede. The caves of Menegroth were deep, and while many Sindar had drowned, Doriath was once the home of thousands upon tens of thousands, the largest dwelling of Elves Endor ever boasted. 

Maglor stood at the head of his warriors. The Fëanorions’ army filled the cleared land like locusts. Amras and Amrod’s forces were the first to see action as the Sindar, pouring out of the caves and making a break for the protection of the treeline, let loose their arrows. The twins’ archers fixed their shields in the ground, and pulled back their recurved bows to cross the arrows flying from the Sindar’s legendary long bows in the sky. 

“Shields!” rang down the Fëanorions’ lines. As one, the warriors raised their shields to catch the arrows. There were so many arrows flying back and forth they hid the sun, and the twang of bow strings was loud as a herd of galloping horses. 

Maedhros’ foot soldiers charged into the caves. Their lord at their head blazed like a red star, hair a fiery, serpentine banner behind him.

Maglor was no green boy. He had inflicted his share of death, but warring against the Bauglir left room for valor and the joy of victory. At Alqualondë there was only terror and grief. At Alqualondë, grown men cut their own throats out of horror and abhorrence for the acts they committed. 

Doriath, though, Doriath. He had marched with his brothers. He had held his tongue when the argument was lost. He had sharpened his sword. And now he killed at his brothers’ backs, cutting down all who raised their hand against them. Yet Doriath was not Alqualondë. Alqualondë was darkness, chaos, a misstep descended into cataclysm, like a planet flung out of orbit and obliterated by the sun.

Doriath was: the scream of _fëar_ ripped from _hröar_ , the power of nature wielded like a reaper’s s scythe, blood splattered like paintings across the jewel-encrusted walls, the huge eyes of children glowing between the shadows of torches as they watched their family’s slaughtered. 

Loyalty. Loyalty. Loyalty.

The steady heartbeat in their chests, bracing their knees from bucking and their hands from faltering.

Vengeance. Vengeance. Vengeance.

A Northern wind blowing the scent of Dragon-fire, burnt flesh, and Orc-filth; his men screaming, betrayers at their backs; Maedhros’ face split open with an eternity of anguish as the light of his world went out: Fingon—

The world crashed into ruin, and cowards and thieves hid behind enchantments while the Devouring of the World burned the skies red. No soldiers sent, not one company out of Doriath plug the bleeding, blackened wounds of Arda as the Noldor died with screams and despair and piles and piles of dead.

So now the cowards and thieves cried for mercy? 

So now they harvested the crop of their indifference to the world’s suffering: the slickness of his sword hilt as he twisted it in stomachs, hearts, throats, eyes, until he held a piece of his father again, and cradled the pulse of fire in his hands. 

Father. Father. Father.

The name they loved more than any damnation, any Curse, any pair of Elven eyes pleading for mercy.

They smelt victory. It was a sweet (too costly, oh Light, too high a cost) perfume in their mouths, so close to finally holding a piece of Father again. Maglor crashed through the Throne Room doors, but more than one winding turn led to the Throne Room and Curufin and Celegorm got there first.

It took a moment longer than it should have to understand the scene laid out like an actor’s stage before him. His eyes burned for a sight of the Silmaril, and squinted into the shadows as if its brilliance could ever be so camouflaged. But it wasn’t there. Like fog parted, like mania doused, the blind-fold of the Oath pulled away. 

Dior’s sword pierce Celegorm’s chest. Curufin lay beside him as they had walked in life; arrows used his body as a pincushion, as if he’d run into a storm of them to reach Celegorm’s side. He had this look on his face, the shock of a little boy who couldn’t understand why the fire hurt his fingers. Maglor remembered holding his little brother in his arms and singing him to sleep.

His knees buckled, and he pulled his baby brother’s body to his, hands slick with all the blood that he kept trying to push back into the holes it gushed out of. He didn’t start weeping until Maedhros carried Caranthir’s body in, holding him like a child, like his weight was nothing. It was nothing, nothing at all to the weight of this anguish making a ruin of their hearts. Maglor huddled over the empty-eyed bodies of his brothers, his baby brothers, and rocked to the sound of the twins’ cries of despair. 

They did not stir from the black jaws of grief until long after the last arrow was loosed. Maedhros left first, and set out on the trail of Celegorm’s men. Maglor had a hazy memory, through the ocean he drowned in, of two boys. One of Celegorm’s men had had them kneeling at his feet in the corner of the Throne Room, tears like pearls in their eyes, so wide and confused and betrayed as they stared at a door no one was coming back through. Sacrificed for lust of a jewel. 

Maglor had not seen when the children had been dragged away. He had not been here kneeling on the polished floor of a hall of nightmares. He had been far away in Valinor, holding his little brothers as they laughed, sweet innocence on their skin like perfume, and unbroken light in their eyes.

But the duties of Lord Maglor pressed the faces of his soldiers against the glass he’d shut himself behind. He returned to the hall of nightmares.

They found Irimë’s body as they began the long labor of clearing the dead. She lay crumpled on a floor polished so much it hurt; hurt to see his face in its reflection. Blood stained her lips. Her eyes stared sightlessly at the crystalline ceiling of caves that didn’t have a right to be this beautiful and horrifying at the same time. He watched blood pool in a slow spread across the floor, creeping like frost. 

Curufin’s man, the one who rolled her over, sneered at her body, the steel of his sword so red red red it throbbed. “We lost the Silmaril because of her interference.” 

“What happened?” Lord Maglor spoke. (Brother Maglor was far, far away holding little hands that folded into his like bird wings).

“Dior, the whoreson, tried to make a run for it when he saw Lord Celegorm coming for him. He had the Silmaril and his brats with him. This bitch,” he toed Irimë’s corpse, “ruined our best chance when she tried to stop Lord Celegorm from attacking Dior while Dior hid behind his brats. Gave Dior time to palm the Silmaril off. Didn’t take as much care for his brats though, did he?”

Maglor looked into her face and felt nothing. He was far away, soaking in the light of dimpled smiles, bird-bright child-eyes, and the way his brothers used to fling themselves, laughing, whole bodies vibrating with delight, into his arms.

He joined his brothers in their mourning: for their fallen brothers, for their breaking, for the Darkness waiting to wolf down what was left of three hearts Maglor loved more than his own; for the stolen light of their father, now carried away by greedy hands that had no right to touch a piece of Fëanor so intimately, hunching their shoulders around the brilliant light as if they could swallow it all down for themselves; for Maedhros who stood dried-eyed, but so so hollow as he brushed fingers over his brothers’ hair, closed dead eyes, and sung them into death with a lullaby –but he couldn’t cry, Morgoth had raped that out of him too.

Maglor had no tears left for Irimë Finwëion. His hands were steady, but somber as he plunged the torch into her pyre and sent her to Mandos.

*

She did not answer Mandos’ call. Valinor was no longer home. Her home was Maglor. 

She became the wind’s whisper, and her fingers once again ran through dark hair as soft as moonlight. She became a ripple of water from the brook he quenched his thirst beside, and she mapped the hot cavern of his mouth once more. She became the earth he laid his body down upon, and felt his weight like a long forgotten dream between her thighs. She became the wildflower, the sun-backed soil, and the grass between his fingertips. 

She was with him always, a soft touch, a scent, a sweet taste of fall berries. She was the pleasure he took in nature’s beauty, and she was content. Her love had no chains now, no leash about his neck. No burdens would she ever again lay upon the shoulders of those she had loved, hurt, and lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *There are some missing parts of Irimë's story filling in the gaps of her time living Maglor/her relationship with Erestor in The Price of Duty (the next story in this series).


	31. Starborn I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: chapter contains rape of underage character (14 y/o)

Intermission: Starborn I

The first part of Míriel Eöl ever touched was her hand. Her fingers were long and spindly, soft as a babe’s cheek, not a callous on them. Their whole bodies were like that, smooth as water, so soft they wanted to sink inside each other’s skin and melt away.

It could be said though that he touched her eyes first, those luminous pools of light the exact shade of the brilliant canopy of stars overhead. The first thing they’d seen after they opened their eyes under the star-canopy were each other’s eyes when their heads turned to discover the body entwined about theirs like they had been born of the same womb. 

Other Quendi awoke in pairs, or in threes and fours, some alone. All had opened their newborn eyes upon the stars. They were the Starborn.

They awoke on the banks of the Sea of Helcar when all was fresh and trembling with life in the world. They wandered the sea’s shores in wonder, every new discovery a moment of crystal-bright awe they carried back to the others to sing over until they found the perfect pattern of melody to describe their new wonder.

The Quendi discovered their hearts did not all beat with joy over the same pursuits, and began to split off to follow the paths of their joys. Eöl was eager to root through the earth and lakeshores for pretty rocks that shone in the starlight or were veined with spider webs of glittering beauty. Míriel’s joys did not match his, but this sowed no sorrow between them. When Míriel’s heart yearned for another and brought Anneth to him, this too sowed no sorrow between them, and they made their bed beside Anneth in the starlit grass and discovered all the secrets of each other’s bodies.

In this delving they unlocked the greatest discoveries of all, and their voices lifted up in song to the star-strung heavens in cries of ecstasy. Eöl mapped the paths Míriel’s body took arching under his, her hair shinning like the starlight as it splayed around her in a halo of silver. He studied the way Míriel’s head between Anneth’s thighs flung Anneth’s clever hands out to grab fistfuls of the grass as if she feared to fall off the face of the Mother itself. He learned the subtle, yielding curve of Anneth’s hips between his palms and her sounds of pleasure as she rode him, hips undulating, the muscles of her abdomen mesmerizing him as they shifted under her black, silken skin.

Time measured itself in discoveries. Eöl uncovered the first rudimentary secrets of metal using the fire Tata had learned how to recreate like lightning striking dry brush. Anneth was the one to ponder the skinned hides of woodland creatures Beleg had taught them how to snare, and use sharp stones on them to scrape off the excess meat and tan the first hide. They sewed the hides together and made for themselves shelters against the rain. Míriel was the first to bend her mind towards the decoration of their bodies with more than strings of feathers, shells, and shinny pebbles. Her fine hands worked ever more delicate work, blooming beauty under their tips. She delighted in draping herself in her creations, and wherever she walked among the other Quendi, she stood out like a lily in the grass.

Eöl brought her beautiful stones he polished until they shone bright as the Quendi’s eyes and beat metal into thin coins for her to sew into her work, and Anneth showered her in the finest fur pelts from her trappings. Míriel fashioned Eöl headpieces that sung sweet as a bird’s coo and shone like their beloved starlight. For Anneth she used her richest dyes and softest wool to caress those curves they had pleasured in. 

They would lie together, entwined on the hammock woven like a tapestry under Míriel’s fingers. They watched clouds pass over the stars, and sang their thoughts to each other in chirps and trills, for Rúmil had not yet experimented with the shaping of words. Before the birth of the first children, their people still spoke the Quendi’s first language, the one that was akin to bird-song.

Arn, a female with golden-hair like clouds (like Anneth’s dandelion puff of curls, only Anneth’s were ringlets black as mink’s fur and Arn’s like marigolds), was the first to convince life in her womb. The news washed fire-storm-swift through the Starborn, sending every Quendi trilling and chirping with excitement and awe. After the news broke, it seemed only natural that they, like the beasts of the forests and sea, would have offspring. But though they delighted in the mating of bodies, no womb had quickened, nor would they have even known the females were to carry the children if they had not observed the wild around them from which they took many teachings.

The Starborn waited in breath-held anticipation for the moment of birth to arrive. Arn was dotted on and pestered with a hundred questions. Arn thrived on musing over every slight fluctuation in her womb and change in her body, glowing under the attention and excitement of it all. 

At last the day of birth came. Arn had told them she carried a single child, and so the Quendi considered what they had observed in large woodland creatures that gave birth to single cubs or fawns. The counteractions could last hours and rack the mother’s body in pain. 

Arn chose the place of her own awakening under the stars to deliver her son, and the tribes gathered with refreshments for her during her long hours of labor. They laid out furs on the grass if her body followed the patterns of the great cats and bears that gave birth lying down. She chose first to stand upright as a doe birthing a fawn. She paced between contractions that twisted her face into grimaces and broke sweat out on her brow, but as the contractions increased in frequency and strength, she retreated to the furs, sinking to her knees, hands pressed palm down in the ground, stomach hanging like a bulging, ripened fruit on a branch. 

It had been decided Rúmil, the child’s sire, was permitted to approach Arn during her labor, similar to how male foxes attend their mated females. He washed the sweat from her brow and naked body. And when her fingers clamped about his, he held her hand as she clenched back screams behind her teeth. The tribes waited in wide-eyed silence as Arn struggled to push the babe from her body. 

From nature they had learned mothers did not require assistance, but when Arn’s voice rose in a call for help, the babe’s head pushed out between her spread thighs, Rúmil hurried to kneel between them and pull the baby the rest of the way from her body. The babies of mammals were born wet and coated in the womb their mothers licked clean, but Arn’s baby slipped into the world with no coat to lick off, though it was wet and its skin almost purple in color. Arn took the baby to her breast, and it suckled like all babes do in the wild.

But experience would teach them that the lessons of the wild proved a faulty guide for the rearing of their own young. Arn’s son did not perish from starvation, nor was he eaten by wolves, but die he did. 

When the boy reached ten years of age, it was determined he possessed the skills now to survive on his own. And as a male, nature showed them he should wander from his parents’ side and explore the world on his own. Arn and Rúmil constructed a tent for their son, and the Quendi danced and feasted as they celebrated the first of their offspring to leave his parents’ nest and sprout wings. His body was still fragile and small in comparison to the Starborn, but so were all males who left their mother’s side to stretch the legs of independence in the wild. In time he would reach full maturity.

But the child never matured. Instead he became listless and did not venture from his tent to forage or socialize. Arn and Rúmil brought him food and watched until he ate. Yet the boy had will to do nothing but lay on his furs, and clouds gathered behind his irises. 

The tribes assembled for council, debating and fretting over what was ailing the boy. But though many stopped by his tent to sing to him of the wonders of the world awaiting him on the hide’s other side, and meals were brought to him unceasingly, the boy did not rise and shake off this strange mood. 

One day Rúmil came carrying a fresh fish to temp his son into eating, but his son did not respond to his trilled greeting, or even his song when he bent close over the body curled up in the furs. And when he touched his son’s shoulder he found the skin cold. The boy’s eyes were open and staring glassy as a dead rabbit’s. His heartbeat had stilled.

A hush fell over the Starborn. The first shadow crept into their hearts as death acquainted itself with them. They had seen much death in the cycles of the wild, and their hands had orchestrated it when they hunted for game, but never had it been one of their own lying still and cold, the bright flame of spirit lost, faded away into dust, or had it flown away somewhere? Back to the stars that birthed them? Or carried away on the wind? 

These heavy questions the Quendi had never asked themselves before in the light of their bliss, but now they did. And asked many others besides, wondering why the child died and how they might prevent the loss of another, for now that they had witnessed the cycle of birth they yearned for more young, bright lights to walk among them, even though death’s shadow had cast itself over their joy.

After long debate, it was decided that the root of the boy’s death lay in premature separation from his parents’ side. Their eagerness had caused them to be hasty, and haste had led to misfortune.

When the next child was born, a female, they waited and watched patiently as she blossomed. At last the day came, and no surer sign could there be that the female had reached womanhood than when her first blood came. Now she was of age to bear children of her own, and though her body was yet slender and fell short of the height of the Starborn, so too did animals in the wild lack the strength of their elders’ bodies when they left their parents’ sides. 

The Starborn named this new generation their Starchildren. 

The firstborn of the Starchildren discovered the delights of her body within the arms of Erben, Mereth, and Dogon who had awoken entwined together in the starlight. When the joyous announcement of another womb’s quickening rippled through the Starborn, a fever flushed over many to bring forth their own offspring. 

Míriel and Anneth were not struck by this fever, but a craving stirred in Eöl to discover this new delight and he searched out a female to mate with. Lenwë was known to him, though they had little in common beyond a desire for offspring. He took her back with him to Míriel and Anneth. But though the four of them lay together in pleasure, after Lenwë quickened with child she chose to fall into the role of sister rather than mate.

Their child was born without the ceremony of the firsts, for by now the Starchildren numbered in the dozens. It was a son, and Lenwë had dreamed the name Denethor for him to carry. But the more the child grew, the less his son had in common with him, and everything in common with Lenwë. He found some pleasure in playing wrestling games with his son and teaching him the names the Quendi had given to the stars, but Denethor had no interest in Eöl’s passions, and, bored, would run off to join his mother in a hunt or exploring the wilds. 

When Denethor’s body showed itself ready to find its own mate, he and a Starchild female selected each other. Eöl and Lenwë helped the young ones fashion their own tent of hides. Then Eöl returned to Míriel and Anneth’s tent with the fresh conviction that fatherhood was not half as interesting as unearthing the secrets of metal and stone. 

Anneth had been out exploring other nests while Eöl was absent from theirs, and when Eöl returned she brought Elwë back with her. Elwë did not fit smoothly into their arms, for while Míriel enjoyed him well enough, Eöl was unaccustomed to the role of submissive, and Elwë refused any role but the dominant. Eöl fought for dominance every night, but lost. Elwë was as canny as he, and possessed the tallest and strongest body of all the Starborn. 

Eöl learned to take what pleasure he could from the matings, though Elwë took no care to coax desire in him, leaving that to Anneth or Míriel while he claimed his mastery over Eöl’s body. Eöl found the greatest value from the experience in the lessons he learned in the role of the submissive. He vowed when he had a male under him, he would take care with ensuring their pleasure.

Elwë wandered from their nest a star season after his coming, moving on to new discoveries. For a time the three of them nested together, enjoying Míriel’s hammock, or lying entwined on their bed of furs on clear nights when they pulled back the tent’s roof and traced the patterns of the stars. 

Then one of the Starchildren caught Míriel’s eye, and she wandered from their nest to make Finwë their brother. Eöl knew little of Finwë before Míriel brought him round to introduce. He was a late born of the Starchildren, for many of the Starchildren had produced children of their own, and Finwë had new-come into his adulthood at fourteen years. 

Eöl had not pondered long over Míriel’s announcement that she fancied another’s bed, for the three of them had all spent seasons wandering to other nests. He had spared little interest in their new brother until Míriel brought Finwë to their tent. Finwë was an uncommonly fetching male with thick waves of hair dark as onyx stones, and eyes like polished moonstones, a deep, rich blue. But it was the first words out of Finwë’s mouth when Finwë gazed upon Eöl for the first time that snatched Eöl’s interest: Finwë marveled at the dazzling beauty of Eöl’s headdress, commenting with admiration on the stones’ polishing and gems’ cutting. 

Eöl approved of him instantly, and invited him to share their bed. But Finwë withdrew into Míriel’s side like a child to its mother’s, and his lashes dropped in a dark fan over his eyes. He muttered words hedging around refusal, but not reaching a definite rejection. 

The Starchildren were strange creatures. This Eöl had thought many times as he observed them. Their births had shifted the dynamics of family over the years with a new emphasis on blood connection emerging, but oddest yet was attempting to understand them as children, for Eöl had never been a child. The Starchildren introduced the concept of shyness and hesitancy, and a host of other ideas Eöl had never thought upon before a Starchild demonstrated it.

Looking at Finwë now, Eöl found he did not understand him at all. If Finwë did not wish to join their nest, why did he not come right out and say so? 

Míriel touched Finwë’s shoulder, and turned him to face her. He looked up at her. She smiled and ran her hands through the rich wealth of his hair, “You do not have to lay with Anneth and Eöl if you do not wish too. Do not worry they will feel left out. We have been together since our awakening; they know I will return to their arms when you and I have wandered apart.”

But her words only served to distress Finwë, and he reached out, latching onto her arm, “But I never want you to wander from me! I wish to be with you _always_.”

“Well Eöl has extended the invitation to be part of us, so you may join us if you wish.” She cast a glance at Anneth. 

Anneth smiled a warm, white-toothed smile at Finwë, “You will find a welcome in my arms.”

A flush swooped like a hawk’s wings over Finwë’s fair cheeks, and his eyes skidded away from her beauty, overwhelmed. He shifted on his feet, teeth biting into his bottom lip, “I...I do not know if I—” His eyes darted to Eöl, then away, back to Míriel. He stared up at her a long moment, naked yearning in his eyes. At last he said, “I want to stay with you.”

She took his hand, lacing their fingers, “Then you shall. Come,” she tugged him forward, leading him towards their bed. 

The air carried no promise of rain, so they had rolled the tent’s roof back. Starlight poured down on their bed of furs where she stopped and turned to begin unwinding the brilliant colored wraps from her body. 

Anneth shed her less complicated clothing in a few loosed hooks and shrugs until she walked gloriously naked to Finwë where he stood very still before their bed with large eyes catching the light. He looked a pretty picture there in the starlight. Eöl moved forward to join them as Anneth began freeing Finwë of his clothing. 

Finwë startled when Anneth’s hands touched him, eyes flying to her face. Her beauty struck him mute, as was only natural. Her eyes glimmered like black opals, and her skin curving over the shape of her high cheekbones looked smooth as butter. 

Finwë held passively still as she unrobed him. His eyes kept darting to the high peaks of her breasts drawn close enough to caress, before he tore his eyes away as if caught doing something he shouldn’t. Anneth shared her amusement with Eöl in a look over the top of Finwë’s head. Eöl came up behind Finwë and sunk his fingers into all that thick, dark hair. Finwë jumped, jerking away like a skittish rabbit.

Eöl laughed lowly and drew him back. He unwound the shinny ornaments from Finwë’s hair, taking the time to admire the finished product at his leisure. Anneth dropped the last of Finwë’s clothes onto the floor, and circled around him to thread her fingers into Eöl’s hair and loose the headdress from its perch.

Míriel finished undressing and stood like the pale stalk of a lily’s throat in the starlight. She might have been a star given birth, so brightly did she shine. Her hair was a net of silver illuminating her, and her eyes glimmered like starlight upon the lake’s water. She held out her perfectly shaped hand to Finwë, palm-up, and he stepped forward to slip his hand inside it. His face tilted up, eyes gazing on her with the same wonder the Quendi had possessed as they beheld the world’s immense beauty for the first time.

Míriel took him down to the furs with her and kissed him. Eöl and Anneth watched them for a moment. Finwë melted in her arms, then roused to press against her with ardor, circling her slender waist with eager arms. He reminded Eöl of a wolf cub, licking and nipping his playful love. Finwë was unlike any of the Starborn Eöl had lain with, a new breed entirely. One thing was clear though, this would not be a repeat of Elwë, for which Eöl was relieved. 

Finwë would have mated with Míriel there on the furs if she had not gently pushed him back and called Anneth to lie beside them. Míriel had the strongest grasp on Finwë’s nature and desires. She would lead them tonight. Anneth crawled across the furs, a wicked smile on her mouth when Finwë turned wide eyes on her and that blush crept back into his cheeks. She took him by the hips and hauled him in for a kiss. 

After a moment’s shyness, his hands fluttering around the shape of her body, he settled them on her shoulders, a light, delicate touch. Anneth would find little pleasure in such a touch, and proved it when she threw Finwë back on the bed and straddled him. Then she proceeded to drive him mad with lust, and had him buckling up into her, fingers sinking into her thighs and hips, holding on, crying out his pleasure, as she rode him. 

Anneth left him a panting mess in the furs, and dropped into them beside Míriel with sweat coating her own skin. She lifted mischievous eyes to Eöl, and said, finger running up the pale line of Finwë’s thigh, “When this one reaches his full maturity you shall have much to _envy_.” Her fingers traced Finwë’s now lax sex.

Eöl huffed in amusement. He had noticed that himself just fine. Finwë held the promise of outstripping even Elwë in height and strength of body. Eöl, built compact and lithe, hoped Finwë did not take after Elwë’s temperament for inflexible dominance as well.

Míriel slipped to Finwë’s side, and coaxed him into sitting up, though the lethargy of orgasm still turned his limbs into loose ropes. She had him lean his back into her breasts, his head falling onto her shoulder, tilting in for a long, lazy kiss. The moment her oil-slickened fingers touched his entrance, he stiffened, pulling from the kiss. 

She hushed him, dropping a kiss into the taut muscles of his shoulder, “Just relax.” 

Her eyes lifted to Eöl’s, and she gave a little negative jerk of her head when he moved to step forward. Her eyes shifted to Anneth instead, passing a request for assistance. Anneth stirred and lifted her hand to cup Finwë’s cock and rouse him. 

A little noise of distress slipped from Finwë’s mouth as Míriel’s fingers breeched him, but he did not try to pull away. He lay pliant in her arms as she stretched him open, until Anneth’s ministrations ignited his lusts again and he thrust forward for more. Only then did Míriel lift her eyes to Eöl and beckoned him come.

Eöl took the furs at the slow prowl of a panther, his body more than ripe for pleasure. Finwë’s eyes had drifted shut, face tilted up to catch a full bathing of the starlight. He was breathtaking, and Eöl wanted him.

Eöl lay down on the furs where Míriel directed him. She pulled her fingers from Finwë’s body and took him by the hips, lifting him. Anneth assisted her, spreading his thighs. Finwë had realized what they were about and made little noises of distress. He did not have to fear, Eöl would take care of him; he knew how to bring a male pleasure.

Míriel and Anneth lowered Finwë onto Eöl’s cock. There was a moment of such fierce resistance from the entrance of Finwë’s body that Eöl doubted he would fit, but then he breached the tight heat.

Míriel and Anneth were not males, and pushed Finwë down too fast, not knowing they needed to wait. Finwë cried out in pain, and Eöl told them to let him handle things from here. After Elwë, he knew what Finwë needed. He took it slow, giving Finwë ample time to adjust to the feel of a man inside him for the first time. Finwë’s arousal had wilted entirely, and his mouth was an unhappy droop, his eyes squeezed tight as if this was something he must will himself into enduring. Eöl stroked his hip, the gentle curve of his back, the trembling thighs, and murmured soft words to him.

When Finwë’s passage had eased its fist-clench, Eöl began to move, guiding Finwë through the motions of riding him up and down. Finwë was not an interested participant though, and the movements were too mechanical to provide pleasure, so Eöl rolled them, putting Finwë under him. Finwë made more distressed sounds, his hands rose to Eöl’s shoulders and he half pushed, half scratched him. The scratches weren’t deep, nothing more than a kitten’s. Finwë was hardly putting any effort into a fight. He still had his eyes clenched shut, face screwed up.

Eöl let out a soft, disapproving sound. How did Finwë expect to find enjoyment when he acted like this? Well, it was fortunate Eöl knew how to bring him pleasure. Once Eöl showed Finwë how good this could be between them, Finwë would stop trying to shrink away.

Eöl slipped his hand between Finwë’s legs, caressing him, and moved inside him, shifting the angle until he found the right one to yank a little gasp of surprise out of Finwë. Eöl smiled and thrust in again, earning another shocked gasp and the flesh between his fingers twitched to life. He leaned in to kiss Finwë, but Finwë turned his mouth away, and his hands resumed their pushing-scratch on Eöl’s chest. 

Eöl frowned, and picked up his rhythm, making sure every thrust drove pleasure into Finwë’s body. Noises of pleasure replaced the ones of distress, and Finwë’s body was most defiantly interested in what Eöl was doing to it, but Finwë did not open his eyes or smile up at Eöl. He kept his teeth sunk into his lip, trying to bite back the noises betraying his body’s delight, but his resistance didn’t change the way his back curved up into Eöl, trying to take him even deeper, or how hard and wanting his sex pressed into the heel of Eöl’s hand.

Eöl brought them to climax, and collapsed atop Finwë, burying his face in Finwë’s neck, inhaling his scent. He dropped a line of kisses into Finwë’s collarbone, and started mouthing his neck, working his way up to his ear, when Finwë said, ‘Stop.’ 

Eöl drew back to look into Finwë’s face. Finwë would not meet his eyes. Eöl leaned forward and tried to kiss him, but Finwë turned his mouth away. Eöl didn’t understand this at all. Hadn’t they just found pleasure together? Why was Finwë continuing to reject him after he’d said he wished to lie with them?

Míriel’s hand fell on Eöl’s back, and he looked up to see her eyes scanning Finwë’s turned away face with a crease of worry and confusion as well. She whispered, “Maybe we should end here for tonight.” 

Eöl did not like ending things in confusion like this, but he bowed to her superior knowledge of Finwë’s nature. Reluctantly, he pulled out of Finwë and tried to ignore the way Finwë grimaced, and how he flinched when Eöl brushed a last caress against his cheek. Eöl rolled away, and Míriel slipped into his place beside Finwë. She wrapped her arms around Finwë, and after a moment in which he lay with his back to her, spine a rigid line of rejection, he turned and threw his arms around her neck, pressing his face into the crook of her throat.

Anneth’s arms slipped around Eöl’s waist, and he leaned back into the comfort of her body. The point of her chin dropped into his shoulder, and he imagined her eyes were open watching the other two the same way his were. Only when Finwë’s breathing dropped into the even rhythm of sleep, did Míriel turn a look back at them over her shoulder. None of the worry had faded from her eyes.

When they roused from sleep and dressed, Míriel caught Finwë’s wrist and drew him down beside her on the furs. She combed the hair back from his face, and asked him if he had spoken untruthfully last night and his heart had no desire to become a part of them. 

He looked down, lashes falling over his eyes, hair curtaining his face, shoulders hunching up. “No,” he denied, “I did not lie.” When their silence conveyed their disbelief, his eyes flew up to Míriel’s face, earnest as a child’s, “I promise I did not. I did—I do want to be here with you. I just…” His eyes flitted over to Eöl. “I am not used—I had never…I will do better next time. I promise.”

Míriel smoothed her hands through Finwë’s hair, and he leaned into her touch. “It is not about things being done right or wrong, but that you did not seem to enjoy it. You understand, don’t you, that you can leave us whenever you wish, you need only say the word?”

Finwë swallowed thickly, looking down. “I do not want to leave you.”

Míriel tilted his face up and kissed him softly. “I do not want you to leave us either, but nor do I want you to be unhappy.”

Finwë grasped Míriel’s hand, “As long as I am with you I could never be unhappy.”

And so they became four in name after that day, but not in heart. None of them were blind to the way Finwë shied from Eöl’s touch. As they lay in the furs, Finwë revolved towards Míriel, monopolizing her for himself. He never refused Anneth, but never sought her touch out either. The other three allowed it, thinking Finwë only needed time to adjust to them.

Then Eöl’s quest for ever more varied metals and stones drew him away from the settlement for a time, following a fresh trail of gold washed down from the mountains. When he returned with his rich finds, he found things between his mates had shifted in his absence. Finwë was fifteen now, and grown in confidence in his body. Eöl noticed the way Finwë’s hands brushed against Anneth’s hips when he slipped by her and they shared a bedroom smile. He noticed the way Finwë’s fingers curled with the familiarity of home in Míriel’s hair, no shyness lingering in the touch. Eöl anticipated the moment they would retreat to the furs, for now, at last, Finwë would welcome Eöl’s touch, and Eöl might have him again, for Eöl had long watched him with desire unsated.

But the hope unraveled when they retreated to the furs. Finwë wrapped himself eagerly around Míriel and Anneth, but brushed Eöl’s every touch off, turning his body away, ignoring Eöl’s very presence in their bed. Eöl clenched his jaw, but reached for Anneth instead and tried to ignore Finwë just as thoroughly, through he could hear his groans of pleasure as he moved inside Míriel. 

When they came to the furs the next night, Eöl reached for Míriel. She turned from Finwë’s kiss and pressed her mouth into Eöl’s, running her hands through his hair. He cupped her breast, thumb teasing her nipple, drawing a moan from her and a whispered, _Eöl_. 

A hand wrapped around his wrist and yanked his touch off Míriel. He looked up, shocked, to meet Finwë’s burning glare.

“That is enough, Finwë. Eöl is my mate,” Míriel’s clipped voice drew Finwë’s eyes down to hers. She did not give him a smile, but a stern look. “If you cannot accept that there are four of us in this bed, then this ends here. It has been long enough. No more of this.”

Finwë stilled, looking down into Míriel’s face. He reached out to her, taking the shape of her jaw into the cup of his palm, thumb tracing the corner of her mouth. Míriel held his eyes for a long moment, and then she turned and took Eöl’s mouth in an open kiss. Eöl slid his hands up the smooth silk of her sides, tucking under her body to pull her flush against his chest.

But Finwë’s hands were there again, pushing between them, not yanking this time, but there was no mistaking his intention to pry them apart. Eöl’s irritation flashed, and his head whipped around to growl at Finwë. But instead of meeting a rebellious glare, Finwë put his mouth on Eöl’s. It was a close-mouthed kiss declaring an offer, not hot passion, but it was enough to freeze Eöl. When Finwë pulled back, Eöl was left staring after him. 

“Take me,” Finwë whispered, “I will lie with you.” In Míriel’s stead went unsaid. 

Possessiveness was not a trait unique to the Starchildren. Eöl had encountered it before, and felt its stirring when Elwë shouldered his way into their bed. Finwë lying under him in Míriel’s place would sooth none of possessiveness’ noose-hold, and yet Finwë was offering what Eöl had long desired. Eöl released Míriel with one last caress that earned a nod from her in acceptance, and took Finwë into his arms.

Last time Eöl touched Finwë with careful hands, this time he took him with passion. His fire only burned hotter when Finwë’s jaw clenched, and his eyes narrowed on Eöl’s face with a fire that was not lust –not yet—as Eöl pushed him back into the bed. Finwë fought him inside the lock of their gazes, that smoldering look challenging Eöl to prove himself to Finwë and make Finwë want him. Eöl answered that look with heated kisses and hands running over every inch of Finwë’s body. He loved the feel of Finwë’s body under him. He felt just as good as he remembered, _better_.

But though Eöl wrung pleasure out of Finwë’s body, and even a few cries of ecstasy Finwë could not bite back, Finwë softened not at all to his touch, his eyes a rejection. When it was over, Finwë turned his back and slinked his arm about Míriel’s waist, drawing her soft curves against his chest. A tremble worked its way through Finwë’s skeleton from head to toe. Míriel put her arms around him, holding him as he shook. 

Eöl, Anneth, and Míriel met each other’s gazes, passing the same look of confusion around. Not one of them understood Finwë’s reaction. Hadn’t it been good? Hadn’t Eöl given him pleasure? Hadn’t he chosen this? Why then was he so distressed in the coupling’s aftermath?

Eöl reached out to touch Finwë’s back, but Míriel shook her head, and he withdrew. He built the distance of the bed between Finwë’s shaking body and himself, and lay down with his gaze never leaving Finwë’s back. His face grew more troubled as the silence stretched, and things he did not like crawled into his belly. 

Finwë let out a little sound, wet and wounded. Eöl sprang up from the bed and ran out of the tent. He ran into the forest, tearing through the trees, hearing Anneth’s breath at his back, keeping pace with him. They ran through the wild, starlit lands, until they came to the bank of a tributary to the lake too wide to leap. They fell into the grass, side-by-side, and stared up at the stars from whence they were born.

They lay in silence for a long time, hands interlaced. Eöl fell back on their first language to speak of his heart, and trilled a note of confusion, and then, like a confession, the mournful note of a dove, singing the sorrow in his heart. He had not meant to hurt him. 

Anneth squeezed his hand, and sang the notes of male, desire, and no. Eöl turned this over. It fit right, but if Finwë had no desire for males, than why had he not told them? And how would the four of them fit in the bed when Finwë could not abide Eöl’s touch on Míriel who was Eöl’s first and forever mate, his twin, the one he woke side-by-side with?

They returned to the settlement with a mouthful of unanswered questions, but the comfort of each other’s hand in theirs. When they reached the tent, they found Míriel alone, seated under the cedar tree spreading its wide palm of branches in the distance between their tent and the lake’s shore. They sat down beside her. Her face spoke of her loss even before she opened her mouth and sang to them of it. She had sent Finwë away. He could not stay here, with them, _between_ them, but it cut her heart like losing one of them.

Eöl grew quiet and pensive. He heard again that wet sound Finwë made. He thought about Finwë when he took him the first time, the way Finwë’s hands left scratch marks on his chest. He thought about the way his mind had spun the resemblance between how that fourteen-year-old Finwë hid behind Míriel and clung to her like a child its mother. And he thought at last he understood why Finwë had not said anything. 

The Starborn had made another mistake in the raising of their young, not as readily apparent as their first mistake that had led to the first child’s death, but a wounding one all the same. Ripe as the Starchildren’s bodies had seemed, their hearts and minds were not ready for the pleasures of the flesh.

Anneth brushed her fingers against his wrist, drawing him back to them. She touched the frown etched into his brow, and trilled her worry for him. He opened his heart to them, and spoke of his fears, of this grave, terrible mistake the Starborn had made. He watched as his own remorse and grief pressed into their faces. Then Míriel stood and called them to follow her. They must speak to other Quendi of this.

They laid down their fears before the gathering of Starborn and Starchildren. Their words sowed distress and denial. Starchildren leapt up to declare the words a lie, clinging to their mate’s hands. Some Starchildren who declared they had been ready and willing were mated to other Starchildren, and others Starborns. But some Starchildren stayed seated and spoke no word, but hunched in on themselves, or turned their faces away. 

Eöl found Finwë in the gathering. Finwë’s face had frozen in rigid lines, his back thrust up like he had a spear for spine. His eyes stared straight ahead and yet focused on nothing.

Long debate followed. It washed back and forth like the tide. At last it was decided that any Starchild already mated and declared themselves content would not be pried from their mates, but henceforth the Starchildren, and the generations to follow, were not to be introduced to the body’s pleasures at the tender age of their bodies’ first ripening. 

Debate followed the heels of this decision on when the right time for mating could be determined. They concluded that only when a Quendi grew into a body the equal of the Starborn would they be considered come of age. Though the assembly came to agreement, they dispersed with heavy hearts, for the gravity of their mistake could not be undone. 

As the Quendi began splitting up, Eöl wove through the bodies towards Finwë’s hastily departing one. Finwë cut a line straight for the trees, almost breaking into a run. Eöl did not dare call out for fear he would bolt. 

Finwë disappeared into the forest, and Eöl plunged in after him. He was still feet behind when Finwë spun around, sensing him. Finwë’s face bleached of color when he saw Eöl all but running after him. He stumbled back, eyes blow wide, looking like stalked prey. He made a desperate sound in the back of his throat, and turned, breaking into a sprint.

Eöl ran after him, “Finwë, wait!” Finwë had sprouted up in the seasons he had shared their tent, but Eöl yet outclassed him in height and strength, but not for much longer. Yet it was enough for him to catch Finwë, grabbing his arm, yanking him around. Their momentum sent them tumbling to the ground, Eöl landing on top. 

The whites of Finwë’s eyes showed, and he thrashed against Eöl as if Eöl were a wolf come to devour him. But he wasn’t. He _wasn’t_. He just wanted to… “Finwë, Finwë, please.” 

He had to lock Finwë’s wrists above his head, because Finwë would not calm himself. Finwë bucked, and tried to twist out from under him, but Eöl bore his weight down; it was the only thing keeping Finwë from running off. 

Eöl did not have use of his hands as they had to pin Finwë’s down, but he tried to show Finwë he meant him no harm with his mouth. He dropped a kiss into Finwë’s cheek. Finwë sounded like he was being strangled. Eöl kissed him again, softly, so softly. “Shh, shh,” he whispered. 

Finwë stopped fighting to get free, but Eöl could not count it a success because Finwë’s body started up the terrible trembling, shaking like it had right before he—

Finwë made that sound. That _sound_. Wet, broken.

“Shh. I will not hurt you. Shh, be still. It is all right now.” He pulled back to look into Finwë’s face, but what he found there only turned his stomach with sickness. Finwë’s eyes were dull, staring blankly up at the tree canopy. Eöl released his grip of Finwë’s wrists, and brought his hands down to cup Finwë’s face. 

“Finwë,” he called, “Finwë, come back.” Finwë did not come back, and Eöl’s hands started shaking. His voice grew spiked notes of desperation as he called and called, but Finwë’s eyes did not regain their splendor. They looked…they looked….like the dead child’s eyes. That little boy who died alone on his furs for reasons the Starborn still did not understand. Was Finwë going to die now too? No, please. Eöl hadn’t meant to hurt him. He hadn’t meant—he just wanted—it was all a terrible mistake, but Eöl had come to apologize, to _fix_ this. 

“Eöl?”

He spun around. He only realized he’d been crying when he could not see her face clearly through the tears. “Míriel,” he choked out, “Míriel, _help me_.”

She was at his side in a moment, and gently urging him off Finwë’s body. She took Finwë’s face in her hands, holding on tightly as if fearing Finwë’s body might float away, or his spirit, like that little boy’s spirit had become lost somewhere between the stars, or maybe on the wind, or maybe just ceased to exist at all. But no, that thought was too horrifying to entertain.

When she spoke there was a different quality to her voice. He had never heard its like, and it sent shivers down his spine to curl in his toes. It was the voice of a star, beauty and power. “ _Finwë_ ,” she called in that voice of might and starshine. “Finwë, come home.”

Finwë’s breath sucked in like a swimmer come up for air. His eyes blinked, focusing, found Míriel’s hovering over him, and threw his arms around her. He held her tight and begged in a gasping voice teetering the line of a sob to let him come back to her, please, please, he could not bear to be parted from her, the world was dark and void without her.

She combed her fingers through his hair, and dropped kisses into his face. She whispered of how she wished she could be with him, of how her heart longed for him, but her heart longed also for Anneth and Eöl. She could not leave them; she was sorry, so sorry.

Finwë cried out, a long wail of despair, and clung to her like a vine –like a child. He babbled wild promises of anything, _anything_ , just do not send him from her side!

Eöl thought his own heart would twist out of his chest if he had to listen helplessly to the desperate grief in Finwë’s voice. His hand reached out and tangled fingers in that luscious hair tumbled out all over the grass. He said, voice roughed by emotion, “He must come back with us, Míriel.” Finwë’s whole body stiffened at his voice, but he pressed on, “This parting is too much for him to bear, let him return to you.”

Her face warred with itself, “I do not know…it all went so wrong last time.”

Finwë had pulled back to look into her face. Seeing the conflict, it gave him hope, and he promised, “I will do better this time! Even…even,” his eyes flickered towards Eöl, but skidded off his face, and a shudder ran through his body, but he pressed on, “I will learn to endure _his_ touch. I can, I know I can, if I just try harder. Just please, please, do not send me away!”

“Oh, Finwë,” Míriel scooped him against her chest, holding him close. “I cannot allow this. Have the Quendi not just decided that what was done was wrong and must come to a stop? I will not continue to hurt you as I see I have been hurting you. You are too young for these things.”

“No, no, I am not!” Finwë shook his head wildly. “And it was decided that those with mates already will not be forced from their sides! We are mates, and your touch has never hurt me!”

“But what of Eöl? You cannot say the same of him, and yet he too is my mate, and I cannot be parted for him.”

“Míriel,” Eöl touched the sleeve of her wrap, drawing her eyes, “Let him return to our tent, and lie in our bed, but let him choose who he will and will not lie with. If he wants only you, then let it be so.”

She held his eyes, distress clouding their brightness. She whispered, “It will tear us apart, Eöl. It will tear us apart.”

Eöl cupped her face, touch tender as his heart turned towards hers, “It is already tearing him apart to be parted from you. Let it rest between us like this for a time, until he is older.” 

Eöl did not dare hope that maturity would draw Finwë to him. It was as Anneth said: Finwë did not desire the male form. And yet, though it would sow troubles between them, Eöl could not bear to see Finwë cast out from them and struggling alone with the weight of a broken heart atop the mistake they had carved into his mind with their ignorance when they took him to their bed too young. Finwë may never call Eöl mate, but Eöl’s heart had enfolded Finwë into it and whispered of the rightness of Finwë there, beside Míriel and Anneth in his heart and arms, impossible as that dream now seemed.

Míriel knew as well as he that time could not shift Finwë’s desires like the ocean eroding the shore line, and yet she relented, for she too longed for Finwë’s place at their side. They took Finwë back with them to their tent. He clung to Míriel’s hand the whole walk back, and would not be budged from her side when they sat down to break their fast with the meal Anneth had prepared in their absence. Eöl drew Anneth aside to explain, and her mouth weighed down with worry. She no more believed time a healer to this than Eöl and Míriel. And yet what else could they do?

When they retired to the furs, Finwë chose Míriel as all knew he would, and Eöl and Anneth found comfort and pleasure in each other’s arms. But nothing was the same, for a line had drawn itself through the furs. They were not four mates, but two sets of two. No touches breached that line, no mouths seeking a kiss. But for the sounds of the other’s mating, the other two could have been in another tent for all the intimacy they shared.

The perfection of Míriel, Eöl, and Anneth’s union was marred, and they never again lay together as they once did, lying entwined upon Míriel’s hammock, sharing kisses and caresses and singing their hearts to each other in the tongues of birds. Outside of their mating the edges had frayed as well, but no tears rent the fabric of their binding, and in some places Finwë was able to thread himself in with a blossom of beauty. He shared moments of tenderness and laughter with Anneth and Míriel.

Eöl’s head chided himself again and again that he would never have a place in Finwë’s heart, but his own refused to give up hope. Finwë and he shared a special connection. If Eöl approached Finwë on the grounds of their shared passion for the secrets and fashioning of metals and gems, Finwë would not turn a cold shoulder against him as he did between the furs. 

Eöl came first with gleaned knowledge on his tongue, and turned Finwë’s ear to him. Then Finwë agreed at last to follow him to the place he worked his metals and gems, and though Finwë held himself stiff and skittish those first visits, his eyes ever darting around as if seeking escape, he relaxed a little bit more every time until he hardly even startled when Eöl’s hand brushed against his as he passed a tool, or their shoulders touched as they worked side-by-side over a fire.

Eöl’s hope now could not be contained. His heart urged him on. He threw all his skill into fashioning the most captivating and radiant body ornaments their people had ever seen. He crafted earrings of glimmering moonstones to match Finwë’s eyes. To string through Finwë’s hair, he cut and polished amethyst and silver topaz with such precision they sparkled like stars. For a necklace worn high about the throat, he worked silver into a fine wire, and twisted it with an alluring design sturdy enough to cradle the lapis lazuli he’d carved into a tear drop. 

Many other works of beauty he fashioned, and one by one presented them to Finwë. He soaked in the awe in Finwë’s eyes, the way Finwë admired the work of his hands, and the way they enhanced Finwë’s striking beauty. But most: he savored the way his hands were granted permission to caress that milky skin and that ocean of thick, dark hair as he arranged the pieces of beauty on Finwë’s body. 

As the number of his gifts grew, so too did his hope. Eöl gifted Finwë a pair of jade earrings, and, as had become their custom, Finwë granted him the gift in return of touching him. With gentle care, Eöl strung the earrings through Finwë’s lobes, pausing to savor the softness of tender flesh hiding behind Finwë’s ears, and the feel of Finwë’s delicate lobes between his fingers, silken as flower petals. When the earrings were set, he dared to tuck loose strands of hair soft as rainfall behind Finwë’s ears and admire all those lines of beauty. 

Eöl’s hope fluttered in his chest. Finwë did not reject his touches, maybe…

Eöl drew back, eyes searching Finwë’s face, distress mounting as he took in the clenched line of Finwë’s jaw and the fixed stare of those lovely eyes over Eöl’s shoulder, not looking at him, wanting nothing to do with him. Eöl had thought…he had thought maybe…but he must not reach out again. He could not surrender his hope, but he must wait for Finwë’s mouth to be the one seeking kisses, not merely suffering through them.

Eöl labored long over his next gift, needing something unique, something never beheld by Quendi eyes. At last he found it in the mountains picking for gems. It was an unnamed and unknown stone, the first of its kind. He polished it and shaped it until it glowed a warm, deep orange. What set this stone apart though was when he held it up to the firelight. It seemed like bubbles and flakes were caught inside it. It was like a picture had been caught and preserved inside the stone. 

He named it amber and drew two smooth, pebble-sized stones from the rough base. He set them at the ends of a bracelet he pulled from gold. It lay against the wrist, two encircling fingers that twisted slyly aside just before meeting at their tips. The amber stones glimmered like snakes’ eyes on the gold fingertips.

He presented his gift, and Finwë’s eyes revealed wonder and longing, but he did not reach out to accept it for a long moment in which Eöl’s ribcage closed tight over his heart. But at last Finwë lifted his hand and took the bracelet from Eöl. Finwë fingered the gold band, eyes downcast, watching the way the light played in the amber. 

Eöl asked, softly, “May I help you with it?”

The silence stretched. Eöl’s breath held, hope a strangled bird in his chest, and yet its wings still beat against his ribs, refusing to be crushed. 

“Very well.” The words lacked enthusiasm, but they were not rejection.

When Eöl slipped the bracelet around Finwë’s wrist, his fingers did not linger on the soft skin of inner-wrist, or flutter over that pulse point. He withdrew, stepping back, and watched Finwë’s face. Finwë kept his eyes on the bracelet. He traced the amber’s smoothness with his finger. He said nothing, but his eyes had not stared through Eöl and his jaw had not clenched, so did that mean there was still hope? Eöl did not know how he could bear it if he must bury a broken-bird hope in a cold grave.


	32. Starborn II

Intermission: Starborn II

When Finwë stood taller and stronger of body than any other Starborn expect Elwë, he was judged to have come of age. But though Finwë was now an adult, nothing changed. 

Eöl’s heart longed as fiercely for Finwë as it did Míriel. For he had lost the comfort of her body wrapped around his. Finwë could not abide Eöl touching Míriel, and Míriel –all of them—were too guilt-stuck over having taken him into their bed too young to fight him on his possessiveness. What if his attachment to Míriel was so strong and unyielding because she had lain with him at such a tender age? What if this was all their fault? So they said nothing.

Anneth often wandered from the settlement, hunting and snaring beasts for her furs. One day she did not return. Search parties were sent out, combing the forests about the settlement, even looking as far as the mountains, but they had known in their hearts she was gone the moment they stumbled upon the giant hoof-tracks that had marked the loss of the two Quendi before her. They were being hunted. And Anneth was…Anneth was…

They did not know the nature or capabilities of their hunter, only that it ate… 

Some Quendi took to the trees, abandoning their tents around the lakeshore to built homes for themselves in the treetops, hoping whatever predator was out there would not be able to reach them. Others stayed on the ground, but also abandoned their tents to construct dwellings of stone and wood. 

Finwë insisted on building a stone house to keep Míriel safe. Eöl agreed stone was best, and they built a house together, hauling slabs of stone with a sled and breaking it into chucks to set between mortar. Míriel did not take part in their labor. 

Too often Eöl found her curled up in their furs, her loom and spindle abandoned. 

Fear stalked him as he lay tossing and turning in the furs, all the pain and terror he’d stuffed down into a black hole in his chest during the waking hours found him at night. He dreamt of Anneth, and found no comfort from this pain, this aching hole in his heart. He woke and stared at the curl of Míriel’s body lying between Finwë’s and his on the furs –and eternal separation. His mind tormented him with thoughts of the first Starchild curled up in his furs, his spirit running away from his body. 

Whenever he found Míriel retreated to the furs during their waking hours, he picked her up, and carried her to her hammock. The stone house’s construction could wait; it would mean nothing if Míriel... So he curled up beside her on the hammock, laying her head on his chest, stroking her silken hair. He sung to her in their first tongue, and she answered in the same. 

They sung their grief into each other’s hearts, this terrible hollowness where Anneth had once glowed warm and vibrant at their side. They clung to each other. Sometimes Míriel would weep, sometimes he, sometimes they would weep together. 

Finwë did not have a place beside them in the hammock, though neither of them purposefully pushed him away, but he was not Anneth’s mate as they were. Eöl would feel Finwë’s eyes on them as they lay entwined. It was not the hot burn of possessiveness, but longing. He longed to take Míriel in his arms as Eöl did and give her comfort, but Míriel turned to Eöl, her twin, her first and forever mate. Míriel did not seek the comfort of his touch on her body, only his heart against hers, for her body’s desires had snuffed out like a candle’s flame. Eöl’s own had waned as well, but he would have taken comfort in her if she had stirred in similar want. 

Finwë’s body was young, and his virility had not ebbed. 

One day while Míriel sat at her loom pulled out into the starlight to work, for their new house of stone shut out the light with its solid roof, Eöl came back early from a trip further down the lake’s shore where he’d traded for raw materials. He’d not had the freedom to wander far in search of gems and metals, for none left the settlements alone now. There had even been talk of building a wall after the latest Quendi had been lost (two this time, attacked in a pair on a hunting trip). But the Quendi had spread themselves out along the lakeshore. Unless they abandoned their settlements to huddle together in a pack, encircling their settlements with a wall would be a mammoth undertaking.

Eöl greeted Míriel softly, brushing the curve of her shoulder. She paused long enough to trill a greeting back before falling into her work once more. He left her, pleased to see a new design flowering under her fingertips. He retreated to the house, entering through the propped open door. His steps trailed off as a groan floated out from behind the vibrant tapestry Míriel had woven as a curtain for their furs. He crossed to the curtain and drew it aside.

Finwë laid spread out on the furs, his long blue tunic hiked up to his waist, baring him for his hands to work on his flushed cock. His eyes were squeezed shut, lip caught between his teeth as he worked himself. He was unbearably lovely with his thick, black hair spread out over the furs, color kissed into his cheeks, and his long, shapely legs bent, falling open just enough to tease a view.

Eöl went to him, crawling on his hands and knees over the furs. The moment his weight settled on them, Finwë’s eyes flew open, hands springing from his cock, and fumbled for his tunic. “Shh,” Eöl slid his hands over Finwë’s knees, gently parting them to slip through, “let me help you.”

Finwë’s eyes flared, and he tried to kick Eöl. Only Eöl’s weight already settled between Finwë’s legs prevented him from being thrown off. Yet if Finwë wanted to toss him aside, he could, for he far outclassed Eöl in strength of body now. 

Before Finwë could shove him off, Eöl made his intentions known. He did not come to dominate Finwë, but offer him pleasure. He wrapped his hand around the thick base of Finwë’s cock, and brought his head down to suck the head in. Finwë hissed, hips jerking up, pushing himself deeper inside the hot cavern of Eöl’s mouth. Eöl opened wider for him, sucking more down, though he doubted he could swallow the whole of it. Finwë had blossomed into an impressive girth of sex as well as strength of body. 

Finwë grabbed a handful of Eöl’s hair at the back of his neck, holding him in place while he rutting up into his mouth with little grunts and hisses of pleasure. He did not toss Eöl aside, but touched him, accepted him. Eöl’s heart soared. Now, at last, Finwë might see that a male’s body could provide him pleasure as well as a woman’s, and he would not turn from Eöl but reach out to him.

After Eöl had swallowed down Finwë’s seed, he pressed his lips into Finwë’s stomach. It was soft as peach skin under his lips. He started worshiping Finwë with his mouth. But Finwë made a sound that…that…it sounded like disgust. He pushed Eöl off him and stood. Eöl lay, tossed aside, staring up with longing and confusion at Finwë’s broad back as Finwë all but fled from the house. He’d thought... he couldn’t get that sound of _disgust_ to stop replaying in his head.

Finwë avoided looking at him, and stopped coming to Eöl’s forge. He stopped being alone with Eöl altogether. Eöl’s chest felt hollowed out. He sought Míriel’s arms, needing to feel them holding him, tracing his face and the curves of his body with hands that found wonder and beauty there. They did not mate, but the coldness in his chest eased whenever her arms wrapped around him and they lay heart-to-heart on the hammock.

The Quendi stopped venturing forth from their settlements when the number of lost Quendi climbed to seventeen. They foraged from the forest at their settlements’ borders and substituted game for an increase of fish and other lake creatures. The other settlements had no more materials to trade him, and other supplies ran low as well. Míriel needed fresh wool from the mountain sheep who could be lured with song into a shearing, and she had sung all this star season’s cotton yield from the plants she’d planted near the lakeshore.

The Quendi gathered and debated their low supplies. It was decided a large party would be sent out to forage their needs from the land. All would have a partner from whose side they must never wander from, and bed down as a group, setting a watch to guard them in their sleep.

Eöl volunteered himself for the party and Finwë did as well. They both took their spears and strapped their bows on their backs. Eöl did not suggest they form one of the pairs together, but when they arrived at the gathering point already milling with armed Quendi, Finwë did not abandoned his side to select another for partner. Instead he stuck close, not quite looking at Eöl. But when the Quendi set out, Finwë fell into step at his side, taking the place as his partner without a word being passed between them.

They spoke little as the days passed. They stuck close, neither wandering from the other’s side, but the air snapped heavy with tension between them. At times Eöl would look up from his foraging and think he caught Finwë looking at him from the corner of his eye. His heart would leap into his throat, and no denial could beat it back down. Finwë _had_ been looking at him.

They had finished singing a thicket of blackberries into ripening and begun plucking the small berries from the stems when Finwë spoke from where he stood a little off from Eöl, body angled the slightest hint towards Eöl so he did not entirely give Eöl his back, “Would you…do that thing you did…with your mouth…on me. Again.”

Eöl’s head snapped up. He stared at Finwë, that stiff line of back, the sliver of profile peeking over his shoulder. Finwë was asking for him. Finwë wanted him. He _wanted_ him. Eöl could have had starshine for blood in his veins, so heavenly did his heart sing. “Yes.” _Yes_.

Finwë dropped his foraging sack at once and strode for him. Eöl stepped forward, eager. He tried to catch Finwë’s eyes, but Finwë was inspecting the ground. Finwë jerked his chin up, towards the knoll’s grassy head and out of the thicket. He turned and mounted the gentle slope in long strides, Eöl following behind him.

The moment they crested the knoll, Finwë turned and grabbed Eöl by the shoulders. Eöl thought his heart might break from happiness. Finwë would pull him into his arms and kiss him now. But Finwë did not pull him close, he pushed him _down_. Eöl went to his knees before Finwë, and maybe it still would have been alright, but Finwë was not looking at him as he pulled up his tunic to reveal his hardened cock. But maybe it was alright because was this not evidence that Finwë wanted him? 

Finwë grabbed the back of Eöl’s head in his strong, large hand, and guided himself towards Eöl’s mouth. But Eöl did not open for him. Finwë was not looking at him. Eöl’s stomach felt like the lake when a storm swept through it, tossing its waters into claw-peaked waves. 

Finwë made an impatient sound, and pushed himself against Eöl’s lips, hand tightening on the back of Eöl’s head. When Eöl kept his lips tightly closed, Finwë snapped, “Well?” 

Eöl put his hands on Finwë’s thighs, holding him back, and turned his face away from Finwë’s insistence. “Not like this.”

Finwë’s mouth lifted in a snarl. “If you think I will _ever_ lie under you again—”

“No,” Eöl’s fingers tightened on Finwë’s thighs. He knew by now that Finwë was like Elwë, determined to dominate. “I know you will not. But I will lie under you.” Finwë frowned, mouth pinching, and yet he did not immediately reject the proposition. Eöl coaxed, “It will be pleasurable for you. It is not so very different from taking a female, is it, after all?”

Finwë’s jaw worked, then he released Eöl and said, voice gruff, “Lie down.” Eöl obeyed, pausing to pull his tunic over his head to lie naked in the grass like an offering for Finwë’s taking. It would be good, Finwë would see, and then he would start seeking Eöl out and they could be mates as Eöl’s heart longed for.

“Wait,” Eöl said as Finwë dropped to his knees in the grass before him. Finwë’s face darkened, but Eöl hurried to explain, reaching for his abandoned supply sack, “It is different with a male, you must slick yourself.” He withdrew a healing ointment that would serve well enough for their purposes, and passed it over to Finwë with a hand trembling with excitement and nerves. He had waited so _long_ , and now at last all his desires were at hand.

Finwë coated himself, but made no offer to slick Eöl’s passage before they began. He did not spend even a moment caressing Eöl’s body, before he spread Eöl’s legs and yanked Eöl’s lighter body down to rest flush against his thighs. He tried to feel with blind fingers for Eöl’s entrance. He was not looking at Eöl, but off to the side, mouth still wearing a frown, brows knotted.

“If you—”

“ _Quiet_ ,” Finwë snapped. 

Icy fingers crept up Eöl’s spine. No, it would be good, Finwë would see. He just needed time. 

Finwë growled with frustration, and tore his gaze away from the distance to look down on Eöl’s body and discover how he could get inside it. The minute his eyes landed on Eöl’s naked body spread under him, his mouth twisted in a grimace. He looked disgusted.

That look plunged into Eöl’s chest like a knife. He didn’t want to do this anymore. He wanted to run away and curl into a ball. He wanted Míriel’s arms around him, touching him like something beautiful.

“Finwë—”

“I said _quiet_.” Finwë grabbed Eöl’s thighs and flipped him over onto his belly, then sunk his hands into Eöl’s hips, lifting them, knee kicking Eöl’s wider apart. He thrust in with one hard shove that tore a cry of pain from Eöl’s lips. It had been too long, too many star seasons upon star seasons since he’d had a male inside him. Finwë wasn’t supposed to take him like this; it was supposed to be beautiful. 

Finwë didn’t wait for Eöl to adjust, even though Finwë _must_ feel how tight Eöl was around him. Too tight. Finwë was too big, he needed to wait. Eöl’s body needed time. But Finwë wasn’t waiting. He was _hurting_ Eöl.

“Finwë, please, wait, it is too much. I need—”

“ _Shut up_.” Finwë’s words stuck him like a slap. His fingers sunk in with the pain of bruises in Eöl’s hips, and he picked up a merciless rhythm, driving Eöl into the ground with the vigor of his thrusts.

Eöl whined, hands clawing into the grass, seeking escape from this terrible pain knifing into his chest and body. It hurt like the moment he understood Anneth was never coming home. It hurt like broken things in his chest, like shattered glass in his lungs. “Stop. You are hurting me. Finwë, Finwë, _stop_.”

“Stop?” Finwë snarled like a beast in his ear. “Stop? Like you stopped when you hurt _me_?”

He hadn’t meant to. Please, he was sorry, so sorry. He hadn’t meant to hurt his Finwë. He had made a terrible, terrible mistake. He was _sorry_.

“Every time you touched me I felt sick. Your disgusting mouth on me, your lecherous hands on my skin, the way you felt like some grotesque growth inside of me, like a parasite crawled inside. It was _revolting_.” 

Eöl felt like he was being crushed under hammer blows, a fresh bone broken with every word. He couldn’t bear it. Please make it stop, _please_. 

He started fighting to get away from Finwë, to make it stop. But Finwë had grown tall and powerful. He fisted the back of Eöl’s neck, large hand encircling it, and bore his weight down on Eöl’s smaller body, pinning him down and rutting into him all the harder, each thrust carried on a grunt of pleasure and hissed, spat words, “I hate you. Do you hear me? I _hate_ you. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!” Eöl bit down on the heel of his hand to smoother the cries of his tortured body and breaking heart. “I wish it had been _you_ eaten alive by the hunter! Then I would never have to look at your repulsive face again!”

Somehow it ended. Eöl had thought it would never end, but it did. Finwë released inside him with one last grunt, and pulled out, collapsing onto the grass, panting.

Eöl curled up around his broken-bone body. It felt like Finwë had plunged his hand into Eöl’s chest and ripped out his heart. Then he’d taken Eöl’s heart and smeared it in animal droppings, making sure he didn’t miss a single crevasse, before he stuffed it down Eöl’s throat where it throbbed now, a reeking pile of shit, choking him. Sobs wracked his body. He wrapped his arms tighter around his too-cold skin, trying to imitate Míriel’s arms, but he couldn’t drive this cold out. He rocked himself, back and forth, so _cold_. Was this what the little boy felt as he lay alone in his tent, dying slowly? But Eöl didn’t want to die. He was afraid. He didn’t know where he’d go when his heart stopped beating. 

Someone touched him, only the tip on his shoulder, a hesitant touch, but skin so warm against Eöl’s cold one. Some of the darkness crawled back from his eyes, and he heard Finwë’s voice speaking to him. He would have whimpered and curled into a tighter ball, but Finwë’s voice didn’t scrape across his skin like knifes this time. “…didn’t mean to. I don’t know why I said those things. I didn’t mean them. I _swear_. I…I just…I…Eöl.” 

Finwë’s fingers moved up from the tip of his shoulder, following its curve to the back of his neck. Eöl flinched. Finwë brushed Eöl’s hair aside and revealed his neck. Eöl could feel the finger-shaped bruises. Finwë sucked in a breath, fingers frozen in Eöl’s hair. “Eöl,” Finwë gasped, a helpless, lost sound. Eöl hunched his shoulders, trying to wrap himself smaller, a keening started in the back of his throat. “No, Eöl, please, I…don’t…just stop that—stop making that noise, stop…I didn’t _mean_ to. I—please.” 

Finwë cupped Eöl’s shoulder and turned him. Eöl tried to shrink away, ball up, but Finwë pursued him. He grabbed Eöl back and took him against his chest, holding him curled there against him. Finwë had never held him before. He’d never touched him like this. Finwë started stroking his hair, whispering that he was sorry, he didn’t mean to hurt Eöl, he didn’t know why he’d done it.

Eöl lay quiet in Finwë’s arms, cheek against Finwë’s shoulder. His breathing soothed from its ragged, wet edge to a soft rise and fall of his chest, his breath puffing against the hollow of Finwë’s throat. Finwë stroked his hair, holding him close. 

Finwë would not have touched him like this if he really thought Eöl disgusting. If he really wanted Eöl to die, if he hated him as much as he’d said, he would have walked away as Eöl sobbed on the grass. Finwë must care for him. Maybe only a sliver of care in his heart, but that sliver of his heart was given to Eöl. 

Eöl didn’t know if he could bear it if his hope climbed back out of the grave Finwë’s cruel words had dumped it in, only for the hope to be crushed under Finwë’s foot again, like grinding the delicate bones of a dove beneath his heel. And yet his heart whispered _maybe_. Maybe Finwë could learn to love him, just a little bit; never an equal to Míriel, Eöl knew that, but maybe just a little bit.

A scream pieced the air, springing them apart. They rushed for their discarded weapons. In the panicked scramble, Eöl did not notice the pain, but once they were on their feet and scanning the woods around them for signs of movement, the injury Finwë’s rough taking had done to his body rushed back with a vengeance. It was all Eöl could do to stumble after Finwë when he started running for a mighty oak tree that offered their only glimmer of protection. 

Eöl gritted his teeth, biting back cries every time he took a staggering step forward. Finwë had reached the oak’s base when he spun around and discovered Eöl had only covered half the distance. Eöl made a motion for Finwë to climb, but Finwë ran back to him. He bent and slotted his shoulder against Eöl’s stomach, wrapped an arm around the back of his thighs, and tossed him over his shoulder like a sack of gain. 

Another scream had Eöl flinching. His hands tightened around the back of Finwë’s waist when the sounds of hooves punching the ground followed on the heels of the scream. It was coming. It was _coming_.

They reached the oak. Finwë set him down and leapt first into the branches, turning back to hold his hand out for Eöl. Eöl jumped, grabbing hold of Finwë’s hand and a branch, and Finwë hauled him up beside him on the thick arm of the oak’s lowest branch. “We need to climb higher,” Eöl urged. Finwë nodded tightly, eyes darting around the forest floor, hand fisted about the shaft of his spear.

They climbed. Eöl found it was not as difficult to move through the tree as it had been to run, and they scampered swiftly up to the higher branches. The hooves thundered now, closing in. 

Terror lunged forward and sank teeth into Eöl’s heart. Darkness blinded his eyes. There was no hope, no light, no beauty left in the world. He had been flung out naked into a void of Darkness so black and thick it crawled its way into his mouth, stuffing him like fingers down his throat, choking him on despair. There had never been anything but the Darkness. It stretched vaster than the universe, indomitable as the night set between the stars, not even their glory could pierce it. It was inescapable. It was god, his god, get down on his knees, fall, crawl, worship, kiss the hem of his lord, the center of his universe, no other could eclipse his lord in might or beauty. His body, soul, and mind belonged to his lord.

 _No!_ Eöl sliced the chains looping themselves about his mind like a cobra its prey. This Devourer in the Darkness was not his god or his _anything_! Certainly not the center of his universe or his master! The Devourer was nothing but terror in the night, and Anneth’s murderer! It could not have Eöl, and it could not have Finwë either!

Eöl spun, snatching up Finwë’s hand, ready to yank him back from the Darkness and burn through the chains, but he found Finwë already shaking himself free of their tangle. Finwë’s face had twisted up in a grimace as he fought for his freedom. It smoothed out as he caught Eöl’s searching eyes. Finwë squeezed his hand back. It was alright, they had escaped.

Only they hadn’t. A horse like creature that could have crushed skulled under its hooves tossed its black mane, snorting smoke from its slit nostrils. It had the teeth of a lion, a horn that could have gorged the tough hide of a rhino and tossed the corpse away like a crumpled fawn’s, but it was its eyes that gripped Eöl in a choke-hold of terror: black holes of hunger, with an intelligence no beast possessed. 

The creature’s rider appeared almost tame in comparison with his back to them and his body fit into a larger mold of a Quendë’s. But this being who rode the demon horse as its master was the Devourer in the Darkness. The Darkness oozed off him, rattling in the corners of Eöl’s mind with the sound of clinking chains. 

The rider swung down from his mount, black boots striking the earth like a thunder-clap. He bent, hair like shifting shadows slithering down his back to curtain his face as he picked something up from the ground. Eöl’s breath iced in his lungs. It was his tunic. The Devourer had his tunic, and was even now bringing it up to his nose to sniff. The Devourer was learning his scent. The Devourer was a hunter, the deadliest predator in the forest, and he was coming for Eöl.

Finwë’s squeezed his hand. Finwë. Eöl couldn’t let—

His eyes swung to Finwë’s face, racing over it, memorizing every detail. “Míriel,” he gasped out through a throat closed too tight. “You must take care of Míriel. You have to…you have to stay safe. Both of you.” Finwë’s hand tightened on his, head shaking, realization dawning in his eyes. Eöl pried his hand away. He must. He _must_. 

Finwë snatched his wrist back as Eöl turned away. “Don’t,” he hissed.

But the Devourer had dropped his tunic back in the grass and was mounting up. He was coming. 

Eöl took Finwë’s hand between his, cradling it. His Finwë. He pressed his lips into Finwë’s palm. And Finwë, his Finwë, curled his fingers around the shape of Eöl’s chin. His thumb rubbed against the curve of Eöl’s cheek, a caress. Eöl gathered it up like a kiss, tucked it into his heart where it burst with a rush of heat and joy through his veins, and tore himself away. Finwë tried to snatch him back, but Eöl’s limbs had sprouted the wings of desperation to save his Finwë, and flew too swiftly for Finwë to catch.

He dropped from the oak’s braches into the grass. The Devourer’s and his eyes met of one moment that yawned out like the immensity of outer space. A black hole sucked at him, powerful enough to crush his chest in, tear his body to pieces and gulp them all down into its ravenous throat. And then Eöl ripped his eyes away and ran.

The chase was over almost before it began. The Devourer snatched him up by a fistful of his hair, almost a lazy catch, and swung him over his lap. The Devourer’s hand clamped about his waist, pinning him down. His touch burned against Eöl’s skin like lava. Shadows pressed mighty hands into Eöl’s mind, the scent of the horse-like creature gagged in his mouth. He couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t—He fell into darkness.

He awoke in darkness. Or had his body died and this was what came after? Was he doomed to entombment in darkness forever? But at least he had not ceased to exist. At least he had saved his Finwë. To spare Finwë, he could endure an eternity in darkness.

But he was not alone. Something whimpered, and the sound of claws scratching against stones reached him. He became aware of his body. He lifted hands and ran them over limbs that had not been devoured. His hands dropped and he felt cold stone under him. He pushed himself up. 

Quendi! Three _fëar_ shimmered in the darkness, breaking its absolute pitch. But as he crawled towards them the relief bursting in his mouth twisted into horror. There was something _wrong_ with their light. It was not only the dullness of the shinning, but the way the _fëar_ seemed frayed, torn around the edges. Some unspeakable horror had been inflicted.

Slowly now he closed the distance to the _fëa_ that bore the least damage. He lifted his hands and traced the features he could just make out in darkness. He knew this face. It belonged to the last Quendë lost to the predator hunting them. 

“Iâ,” he called. Iâ flinched, scrambling back from his touch. “It is me, Eöl. Iâ, you know me.”

Silence. Iâ cowered against the stone wall.

“Iâ?”

Iâ whimpered and turned his face against the stone, pressing his cheek into its rough embrace as if he found comfort in it.

“Iâ, it is Eöl.”

“Shh, shh,” Iâ muttered, rocking. “Shh, must be quiet, must be good, yes, be good, be good and they will take the pain away. Be good, be good, be good.”

Eöl reached out and stroked Iâ’s filthy hair. All the braids had unraveled. Iâ used to have such beautiful braids. He and Anneth would sit on the lakeshore and braid the jade and lapis lazuli beads Eöl carved for her into each other’s hair. 

Iâ did not flinch from him this time. Eöl stroked his hair until the rocking and mutterings stopped. Then Iâ whispered from the darkness, “Eöl?”

“Yes, it is me.”

Iâ said nothing, and the silence stretched. But then, “At least you are not a female.”

Eöl’s hand stilled. Anneth. Anneth was taken. “What—” his throat sealed shut.

A shudder ravaged itself way through Iâ’s skeleton. “Why are they doing this to us? _Why_?”

Eöl drew him close, and Iâ clung to him like a child. 

Iâ whispered in his ear like the horrific secret it was: “They keep putting _things_ inside the females’ wombs. They aren’t Quendi. I—I saw a birth once. It…a monster…but at least it was dead. They are all dead. But that makes _them_ so _angry_.”

“Who?” Eöl whispered back.

Iâ trembled against him. “I think…I think they are _gods_. We will _never_ escape them. They will devour the world!”

Eöl clutched Iâ closer. He thought Iâ might be right. But they must not allow themselves to be devoured. And the thought of Finwë and Míriel taken too, and being hurt so deeply their light began to fade until they unraveled into nothing was unbearable. 

He buried his face in Iâ’s dirty hair, breathing in the scent of terror and unwashed body. “Anneth,” he choked out, “do you know what happened to her?”

Iâ’s silence stretched out and out, yanking open Eöl’s chest. But then Iâ lifted his arm and pointed. Eöl turned his head and stared at one of the other _fëar_ shivering in a corner. Anneth’s _fëa_ used to dance with a merry yellow light, like a field of sunflowers. 

Eöl eased Iâ from his arms and slowly approached the figure huddling on the floor. Her stomach was bloated with pregnancy, but that was no Starchild inside her. It was no Quendi; there was no bright, young _fëa_ entwined about her own. It was like her womb carried a corpse child.

She had been the source of the scratching he’d heard when he first woke. She scratched and scratched at the stones. Her nails…they weren’t…they were too thick and tough. 

As he drew close, she scuttled back, all hunkered down, eyes shining like a beast’s at him from beneath the gnarls of her hair. He took another step forward. She snarled. He dropped from his height into a crouch, coming eye-level with her. “Anneth?”

She swiped her nails at him, raking the back of his hand. He cried out, sprawling back on the stones. She did not pounce on him like a predator in the wild, but her eyes…her eyes… “Anneth?”

She scratched her nails down the stones. 

“Anneth, it is me. It is your Eöl.”

She watched him with the eyes of a beast.

“Anneth, Anneth please, Anneth.”

Anneth

Anneth

Anneth

*

Míriel. Finwë.

They were the lights in the darkness, hoarded in his soul like pearls: eyes like star-shine, another pair the dark blue of moonstones. His tongue barely remembered his own name, yet clung to MírielFinwë like the last bit of thread in a tapestry almost shredded, so close to being utterly destroyed.

It ended (it would never end; his mind and soul had been scarred beyond repair) when creatures stuffed into the faces of Quendi stormed into the prison cells the Quendi not yet twisted into _other_ were kept locked up in until their tormenters came for another round. They burst through the doors like swords of flame and started killing. They mowed through the screaming, terrified Quendi who were still _Quendi_ even if they crawled on the floor like beasts and flashed the eyes of wolves. They were not the Lost who ate their own kind and groveled at the Devourer’s feet. They were not Lost, they were _not_.

MírielFinwë. MírielFinwë. MírielFinwë. 

(Anneth was Lost. There was no Anneth anymore.)

There Eöl would have died, speared upon the merciless swords of these creatures that were like the Devourer: stuffing themselves into the faces of the Quendi, stealing their bodies for themselves. But a voice that rang like cracking stone yanked the indiscriminant killing to a halt.

One of the killers turned with a lazy pivot of his foot, hair grey as sea-storms swinging behind him in a long tail. He turned to the one who had spoken and stood now framed in the prison’s doorway like a pillar of golden light, “It has to be done, Eönwë. If you cannot stomach it, then go hunt down some of those idiot Maiar who trapped themselves in the skins of fire-demons.”

“Some might yet be saved!” 

The killer huffed, balancing the flat of his bloody blade on his shoulder, and spread his arm, offering Eönwë the prison. “If you insist, you may deal with them yourself.” He sauntered towards the door, “And when you have learned your lesson, make sure you slice all their throats before you leave. We would not want any _real_ Children to die because you do not have the stomach to get the job done.”

Eönwë did not step back from the door and let the other pass. He learned forward, eyes naked flames, “Watch yourself, Ossë. I do not tolerate defiance of my orders. And I made your orders _very_ clear.”

“What are you going to do? Run and tattle to Manwë?” Ossë sneered.

Eönwë’s mouth curled. “Defy me again, and you will find yourself trapped in a tornado for the next Age of this world.”

Ossë arched a brow. “Naughty. I think someone isn’t playing protocol.”

Eönwë smiled with teeth, and stepped out of the doorway, using the same mocking gesture Ossë had to offer him the room. Their eyes stayed locked in a battle of wills until Ossë looked away. He walked out the door, a stiffness to his walk once all swagger.

There were only nine Quendi left for Eönwë to question. Some still remembered their names, one of these had only been a prisoner a short time and spoke on behalf of the Quendi who huddled in corners, unresponsive, and swore they were not Lost. The others would care for them. They were not Lost. Don’t kill them, _please_. (Eöl said only: Míriel. Finwë. Míriel. Finwë.)

The nine of them walked out of a pit of nightmares (carried it in tattered mind tissue, every scar on their body, the dulled light of their _fëar_ that looked like a rat had gnawed on the edges of their very souls). They beheld the starlight from which they were born. There were no words for that moment that spanned seasons, years, in which they stood, entranced in the womb of their mother. It seemed to Eöl that he drank starlight and it quenched his thirst, and he ate of it and it nourished him like a mother’s milk, and it caressed his skin so long accustomed to the touch of cruelty and pain that knew no beginning or end. He was reborn in starlight. And yet it could not take away the memories that sunk their knives into their hearts. It could not give them peace.

From one of their mouths tumbled the word home.

Home: MírielFinwë. The shape of that word in his mouth was Míriel’s body curved around his, the sound of Finwë’s voice shaping his name, the way Finwë’s mouth molded around its vowels, cradling it like he’d cradled Eöl in his arms the last time Eöl ever saw his face. That was home.

They went home. Only, they had forgotten the way, or never knew it to begin with. They wandered, lost, they were lost and aching for the curves of their mother’s arms, aching for _home_. 

They wept many bitter tears, and cried out with the anguish of the forsaken. They were forsaken, utterly alone in this cold world, trapped in the terrors inside their minds. They curled their bodies around each other, but could find no shelter from the wolves circling them in their minds, come to rip chucks off in night terrors that chased them, rabbits before a hunting pack, terror a throbbing pulse point in their necks, sweat beading their brows, screaming. Waking. But no comfort to be found in waking, for the night terrors were memories that pressed their rotten bulk into the backs of their eyes. They would never escape. They had not left their prison cell behind them, but brought it out with them in the cages of their minds.

And then one day they found home. But it was not home at all. There was no MírielFinwë. Eöl stood in the middle of a stone house stripped naked of every touch, not one thread left to wind about his finger and press to his lips. Where were his MírielFinwë? Where had the only light in the world gone? 

The Quendi still clinging to these lakeshores were not their people anymore. These Quendi looked upon them and saw nightmares. Those of the nine whose hair had not long fallen out like Eöl’s, were matted with filth. Their mouths were toothless (though a Quendë’s teeth would grow back with time). Their flesh had stopped knitting back together seamlessly and was crisscrossed with scars, and their bodies skeletal. Their eyes were fey, pupils strange and elongated from so long without even the starlight. The eyes of a beast. The Quendi cringed away from touching these ugly, twisted creatures. 

But some amongst the nine yet looked like Quendi, their eyes not yet morphed to match the Lost’s. To these the lakeshore Quendi answered desperate questions asked. This was how the nine learned of the coming of Oromë and the Great Journey West.

The Quendi did not want them here invading the beauty of their lake with their hideousness, or shattering the peace snatched back after so long living under the shadow of fear. The lakeshore was not home, and these were not Eöl’s people. He did not linger to be driven out, but left with the six others too ruined to have a place here. The two not yet ruined of body stayed. 

He turned his face West. MírielFinwë. They had traveled West to the kingdom of the not-Quendi who stole Quendi bodies. He did not understand why they would walk willing into a prison cell, but though every instinct wanted to fly as far from the not-Quendi as he could, his heart turned him West. 

The other six turned East, following their instincts. Eöl went on alone. Months, years passed, his mind had no measure in those black days. He wandered the world, searching for home. West. West. A fall of silver hair, skillful hands upon a loom. West. West. An ocean of thick, black hair twinkling with the gemstones Eöl’s hands had threaded inside, strong fingers curled around the spade of his chin, a thumb’s caress.

MírielFinwë. MírielFinwë. MírielFinwë.

The sea, a vast, heaving breast of severance, a dark abyss slicing through his heart, snatching MírielFinwë from him. But he had wandered the circumference of the world, his guiding morning star MírielFinwë. The only light in his existence. He would not be parted from them!

He built a raft, and did not care if he died in the crossing. He launched it into the sea. He died out there, consumed by the ravenous jaws of thirst. He died many times, and was reborn in storms, mouth an open sore, baptized in rebirth. He lived on. He died again. He was reborn.

Months, years? An eternity of life and death, a cycle as ancient as nature’s first gasping breath. There was no light in the world but the shining light of his stars: MírielFinwë. He would be home soon. Soon. Soon. He would be home. 

He was tired.

So very…

A great wave rose out of the West and lifted him in its palm. His body flipped over and over inside its wall of water, and yet he did not drown. It dashed his body against sea rocks, and yet he was not broken. He lay, gasping for breath, a soaking mess, his short hair (begun to grown back at last, like his teeth) plastered against his cheeks and neck.

A voice mighty as the ocean’s bones rumbled and rolled, sucking all the oxygen from the air, “Valinor is closed to. You have been touched by Darkness. Your soul is tainted. There is no place for you within its Light.”

The oxygen flowed back into the air, and the presence pinning Eöl to the sea rocks withdrew like the receding of a wave from the shore. The light… two stars in the darkness…his MírielFinwë, were snatched from his hands that had cradled their brilliance so long in that place of desolation and anguish, of pain beyond the soul’s endurance and a mind’s breaking. All was darkness and despair. 

Eöl wept. The Darkness had not swallowed the whole of him in those dark pits of torment. He had had his light, his two stars, his MírielFinwë to cling to, but they were lost, lost! He was lost, naked, and alone in the Darkness. 

He wandered in darkness. If he nourished his body, he did not know. If he fell into exhausted sleep, he did not know. A black cloth had wrapped itself around his face. He could not breathe, could not see, there was nothing but death awaiting him, and yet he did not lie down to die because he was afraid. What if he ceased to exist?

Then one day the black cloth drew back, for she had come to him, calling his name in the darkness, pulling him back as she once had pulling Finwë with the power of her voice like starlight. Míriel! Her hair swung before his eyes. He reached up, hand trembling, and touched it like it was a pale moth’s wing that would crumpled under his fingertips. 

Oh Míriel! His twin, his star, his mate. He caught her in his arms, and poured his love into her mouth. He kissed and kissed her, all over her beloved face, whispering her name with the reverence it deserved, for it was more beautiful than a crown of diamonds.

“Eöl. I am sorry, but that is not Míriel,” hands pulled him back, trying to sever him from his Míriel. No! He fought them, clinging to his star, weeping and begging them not to take her from him.

“It is all right,” the deep voice of a male said at his ear. “Let him be, Beleg. He is not hurting me.” Hands stroked through his hair, caressing the valley of his nape, following the curve of his back. The deep voice of a male sang softly in his ear. 

It was not Míriel. He knew that now, but he could not stop clinging. It had been so long, so long since he’d felt arms around him. He thought if the arms stopped holding him he would fall into pieces. 

Every time the arms tried to ease him back, he gripped tighter and refused to let go. Voices spoke around him, the body holding him shifted. He locked his arms around it in anticipation, but the body only shifted to a new position. More talk passed back and forth, the hands would come up to stroke him at times, but then fall away, sometimes to pick up different tasks. The body slept under him, he slept. He did not let go in his sleep. The nightmares were always waiting, grinning at him with fangs glinting wet with blood. But when he fell into sleep in the body’s arms, the nightmares did not come for him. He dreamt of MírielFinwë. He woke and wept again, body shaking with grief but also relief. He had not slept without torment for so long he had forgotten the taste and shape of dreams. The hands caressed him softly as he wept, the deep voice muttering gentle words in his ear. 

Voices talked again around him. Arms tried to pry him gently away, but he would not go back into the darkness, please, please! Hands combed through his hair, that deep voice in his ear, “Shh, now. I will not leave you, but we must move on. We will take you back to our home, and you may stay there with us as long as you like. There are many other Quendi dwelling in the forest with us, and other Starborn as well. Beleg, here, is known to you. And Elmo who leaders us is there as well. Come home with us.”

Míriel and Finwë would not be there. It would not be home. But it would be better than the darkness. 

At last, slowly, Eöl let the body go. He drew back and looked into the male’s face. He saw Beleg in his features, but the male had the green eyes of a forest. The hair Eöl had mistaken for Míriel’s was not silver but pale as spilled milk.

The male smiled at him, a soft uplift of his lush mouth. “I am Breglos,” he said. “Beleg’s Starchild.”

Eöl had not taken Beleg as the kind of Quendë to pursue fatherhood. Beleg had lived a solitary existence after he woke alone under the stars. He hunted the wilds alone more often than not, and took few Quendi to his furs, and no mates.

Beleg sat cross-legged beside his Starchild, and smiled when Eöl’s eyes slipped to him, but there was sorrow in the smile, compassion for Eöl’s loss. He said, voice softly falling starlight, “I would take you across the sea if I could and return you to their arms. They never stopped longing for you.”

Tears gathered in Eöl’s throat. “Even…even Finwë?”

Beleg reached out and rested his hand on the curve of Eöl’s shoulder, “He mourned you. I know without a shadow of doubt that they both would rejoice to see you returned to them.”

Eöl’s face fell into despair, “I am cast out. Tainted. I tried…I tried to go to them, but the _Valar_ ,” the name Eönwë had named his race with twisted in Eöl’s mouth, “will not suffer one such as I to walk among my own people again!”

Beleg’s face creased, troubled. “I cannot say I am altogether surprised –not that I think they have any right to bar you from our people,” he hastened to add when Eöl’s body withdrew into itself. “No, it is them I do not trust.”

“But you are far west,” Eöl said. “You must have set out on the journey. You must be heading to their lands yourself.”

Beleg’s mouth turned down. “Yes, I set out, but my heart was never in it. For all I enjoy the wilds in solitude, I had no wish to be parted from our people. I am not the only one whose feet traveled the miles with reluctance. I believe most of the Nelyar tribe left the lakeshore in a desire to see the wider world, rather than any great longing to dwell among these Valar. Many found places they broke off from our main host to settle. We,” he gestured between Breglos and himself, “as well as those who now follow Elmo, ceased our journey West when Elwë was lost. He was our leader, and the one whose blood was hottest to push West.”

“I do not understand this about Elmo and Elwë being leaders. When did our people begin choosing leaders and not deciding as one?”

“It was an ill-day the Vala Oromë came amongst us. He not only planted the desire to seek the West in many hearts with extravagantly spun tales, he also said the Quendi must have leaders to send West as ambassadors. The tribes gathered, and for the last time we discussed with no hierarchy amongst us what was to be done. Then it was decided to look to our greatest teacher: nature. We looked to the beasts and saw how they selected leaders amongst them, through contests of strength and canniness in a fight. The tribes held a Contest, and a leader emerged from the three tribes: Ingwë, Finwë, and Elwë.”

Eöl grimaced. “Elwë was a poor choice.”

Beleg nodded, “Yes, but he dominated all. While I wished no ill upon him, the day Elmo won the Contest to replace him as leader after his loss was a fortunate one.” 

Beleg continued, eyes soft with compassion, hand on Eöl’s shoulder passing comfort and the promise of acceptance from these two at least, even if all other Quendi turned from him: “Will you come home with us?”

Home? No, it would not be home. Eöl would never be able to go home again, and that was a grief no amount of time could erode. But yes, he would return with them. He did not know what welcome awaited him, for his skin would never erase the scars marring it, and though his appearance must not be as gruesome as it once was, for Beleg and Breglos had not shrunk from him, he would never again be fair to look upon. 

But the scars on his mind, the frayed edges of his _fëa_ , the black claw marks of Darkness’ taint, were a burden far beyond that of marred beauty. He had lived through nightmares in the darkest pit in the world. The Eöl he had once been was dead. He did not know who this Eöl formed of the scraps of him was.


	33. Chapter 28

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 28

Year 316 of the First Age, Himlad 

Aredhon, third son of Fingolfin, looked up at Celegorm over the body of their kill. They were best friends and cousins, inseparable just like Maedhros and Fingon. 

Aredhon was able to think of Maedhros and Fingon’s friendship with fondness and protectiveness, for Aredhon was a son of Fingolfin too, and had no reason to feel jealous over Fingon’s place in the world. Aredhon had everything Fingon had. And in the mornings, before running to catch Celegorm so the two of them could spend the day together in freedom and happiness, Aredhon’s father would snag him around the waist, pull him in close for an embrace and whisper in his ear: I adore you, you know that? And Aredhon would know it was true. He was everything his father had ever wanted in a son. He was the best of brothers, and a steadfast son all could rely upon. He was just like his father.

Aredhon met Celegorm’s eyes over the doe’s body. It steamed in the cold snap of winter, its red blood flowering in the snow. “Melkor came to the palace again. He tried to invite himself over for dinner, but I had told my father of Fëanor’s suspicion that Melkor and the Dark Hunter the Eldests speak of in hushed whisperers are one and the same. Father has never trusted Melkor, but he tolerated him in cold politeness. Now he is doubly on his guard and turned Melkor away at the door. Melkor –the slime—tried to honey-talk my father into letting him in. Father slammed the door in his face.”

Celegorm and Aredhon shared wolfish grins. Celegorm flipped his knife, catching it deftly (the show off), and started cutting the doe’s belly open. “It is well you took my advice, and passed on my father’s warning. It is best all of us are on our guard. These are troubling times.”

Aredhon clapped Celegorm on the shoulder. “As long as our family sticks together, even greasy Valar cannot get the best of us!” They laughed, and Aredhon knew everything would be alright. The House of Finwë was uniting against its common enemy, even Fëanor and Fingolfin had started passing warnings to each other, the ice that had grown between them beginning to thaw.

Aredhon squeezed his cousin’s shoulder. They were a pair, the two of them, hunters on their guard for predators at the door. Together they had caught Melkor’s scent and begun the work of uniting their family.

“Lady Aredhel?” a knock on the door. “Lady Aredhel, your food tray is untouched again. Please, lady, will you not eat something, or come down to the hall? My lord Celegorm will return soon from Lord Caranthir’s lands, but there are other ladies and lords that will keep you company in the hall. Will you not come down?”

Aredhel pushed the covers off slowly, lethargy weighing her limbs down. She was a carcass a layer of skin had been pulled over. She felt so heavy inside; she’d forgotten how to get out of bed. 

She wanted to close her eyes and dream…dream impossible dreams of what could have been. If only…if only…if only she’d not brushed Celegorm off when he told her of Fëanor’s suspicious, thinking Fëanor had grown paranoid indeed. She’s made some _stupid_ remark about needing to stop seeing shadows in every corner and her father could handle himself just fine, thank you. She’d been as prickly with injured pride as she was careless with a diamond of knowledge that might have saved—

Aredhel picked up a knife, walked over to Aredhel, and slit her throat. The blood splayed out, dripping down that foolish girl’s neck and into the bodice of her white dress. There. The useless regrets stopped.

“Lady, please, will you not come to the door? You have not left your room for three days.”

Aredhel dragged herself out of bed, though all she wanted to do was fall into Aredhon’s life. Aredhon, who did everything right, who was a good son and brother. (Not Aredhel who had failed _everyone_. And had not made one right choice in her life.) She wanted to be Aredhon who did not have a dark, feral forest in his head, his tempest, his titan.

Her titan sleep now, but it always woke back up. Always. And Aredhel could run through all the leagues of tangled forest in her mind, a fleet-footed doe, but her titan was the mistress here, and Aredhel an easy kill.

She hauled a shell of a body to the door, and cracked it open. She shut her eyes against the light of a candle after so long in the dark, before blinking them open and focusing on the woman before her. The woman held a food tray tucked under her elbow, the candle in the other. 

What time of day did Celegorm instruct his servants to deliver his supper? The scent of the food cramped Aredhel’s stomach. How long had it been? “Thank you,” she croaked, and edged the door open enough to reach for the tray.

“Lady…” The servant trailed off, eyes running over Aredhel’s unkempt appearance.

“That will be all,” Aredhel’s voice came out in a snap (shamed).

The servant dropped her eyes, and handed the tray over. “If you should…our lords’ people are not cruel. They would not scorn you if you joined us in the hall.”

Aredhel closed her eyes. She shouldn’t have snapped at the woman. One more mistake to pile atop the hill of bones. “I know,” she whispered. “And…thank you for your consideration. Good-night.” She shut the door, body sagging against the wood. 

She wanted to go home. Why had she come here? Because her titan had shaken her body with the might of its storms, laughing too loudly, tossing her head, spurred on by the thought of a challenge. So the guards thought she couldn’t handle the Valley of Dreadful Death? She’d show them. She was a titan; there was nothing she could not do. She could pull down stars and eat them whole.

She wanted to go home. She wanted her father. Her father held her through the storms. Her father was dock and safety and love unquenched no matter how many times she stumbled and failed, pushing him away, he was always there to pick her back up again. But her titan didn’t need a father, didn’t need anyone. Her titan laughed in the face of the very idea.

If Celegorm had been here when she arrived, her titan singing in her blood, holding the reigns of their mind, maybe he could have caught her in his arms or held her hand as they ran away from the wolves hunting her together. But that was just a fantasy. That was Aredhon’s Celegorm, or maybe her Celegorm too, before she’d destroyed their friendship like she destroyed everythi—

She picked up the knife and slit Aredhel’s throat. 

She shuffled to the bed, collapsing into it like a wadded up rag. She shoved aside the crumpled bedstead, and set the tray down on the white bed sheet. She began to eat, mechanically, shoveling food into her mouth with no more decorum than a kitchen girl. It tasted like sawdust. She forced down two more bites, and then left the tray on the bedside table and curled herself up in the covers. 

She closed her eyes and pulled up Aredhon’s life. She had walked many dreams inside his boots, rewriting a hundred memories to give them another shape, the _right_ shape. His friendship with Celegorm was the easiest to dream, for it hurt the least. She missed Celegorm, he had been her best friend, but the knife of their destroyed friendship did not plunge into her like her failures as a daughter, sister, and aunt.

Why hadn’t she helped Turgon more after Elenwë’s death? Why had she been so _selfish_? If she could just redo those years over, if she could just…Turgon used to be her second steady rock, like father (Fingon was too complicated and knotted up in her heart to lean on. She’d wanted to _be_ Fingon too badly. She loved him, but the envy never loosed its hold on her heart. Fingon had always seemed to have everything, and be the perfect son, the one Father adored). Turgon’s foundations had crumbled after Elenwë’s death. There was no room on what was left to steady his sister’s tipping feet. 

He had _needed_ her. He had never asked anything of her before, understanding her as no one else but Father did. Just one thing, one thing he had asked of her, just one thing: be Idril’s mother. But Aredhel couldn’t be anyone’s mother. She was drowning and would have pulled Idril down with her. Her titian would have killed Idril. Not on purpose, but her titan was strong as the roots of the mountains, or thought she was. Her titan would get Aredhel killed one day too. How could she drag a child into the dark forest in her head?

But he had needed her, and she hadn’t even tried. She’d run away, like she always did. Her guilt had driven her to follow Turgon to Gondolin. This time, this time she would do better. This time she wouldn’t trip and fall. This time –ended like all the others. And Father hadn’t been there to pick up the pieces, and Turgon either hadn’t noticed or no longer cared, and Irimë was a selfish creature singled-minded in her devotion to herself, and Idril hadn’t deserved the burden of caring for the aunt that was supposed to be caring for her, and poor little Glorfindel was, in his own way, unfortunately akin to his mother in self-absorption. 

In the end, she’d had to save herself. But she hadn’t saved herself. There was no saving her. 

She couldn’t run fast enough to escape herself, and the titan was her, and this heavy weight pressing into her, making her feel like her bones were collapsing one by one inside of her, was her too. Or maybe she was neither of them and was lost in the dark forest somewhere. But it had been so long since she’d been able to breathe without the titan’s breath hot and predatory on the back of her neck, she doubted her memories now of there ever having been a time before the titan. She had thought there had been once though. She had been a wild, free-spirited child, but she had memoires of honey-sweet happiness and peace. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d tasted either.

And now, here she was, crushed under the weight of her dark forest, free of the cloistering rose gardens of Gondolin but not free at all. She had meant to go home to Father, but her titan had roused, flexed its muscles, and dragged her under.

She covered her head with the bedspread, blocking out even the sliver of moonlight the heavy, shut drapes did not chase out. She plucked up the thread of Aredhon’s life, and spun dreams around her trapped mind. It was the only escape she had.

A week later Aredhel left the kitchens with a laugh, swinging the sack of food over her shoulder. It would last her a few days when she was out ridding, more when she shot game to toss into the cooking pot. There was no if about it. She was a fantastic shot, and a superior rider to any other. She never let Celegorm forget the times she’d beaten him in a race (and he never let her forgot the times he beat her). 

She grinned, shaking her head. When he got his lazy bones back here, they’d see which of them had rusted over the years and who was as sharp as ever. She was betting on herself as the winner, of course.

She strode down to the stables with a swinging stride, winking at a young woman who followed the lines of her body, and tossed a rude gesture at the man who whistled at her. Wastrel. 

She grinned with tooth as she reached the stables and her faithful Thala whinnied a greeting. She would fly high upon the wings of wild lands and freedom. How good it felt to be shod of that cramped valley and returned to open grasslands and woods teaming with game to be hunted at last! 

She was having a grand time. And when Celegorm showed his face again, she wanted to have an impressive kill to boast of and turn him green with envy. She hoped she ran across some Fell-wolves, or an Orc-pack, or a Troll. She’d like the trophy of a Troll’s head, though she’d have to leave it in the wilds with the stench the creatures put off. She wished she had one of the Giant Spiders she’d killed to show off to Celegorm. Those guards hadn’t thought she had the backbone to ride into the Valley of Dreadful Death. But she’d shown them! She was fearless. A titan among women.

The forest was a foreboding place, but she knew no fear. She’d plunged into it with the thrill of all the rich game awaiting a superior huntress like herself. She’d picked up the trail of an elk herd. The tracks weren’t fresh, but she would see where they led. There would be meadows thriving with game somewhere in this forest. 

She came across a brook, and dismounted. The brook ran low this deep into autumn. The harvest had already been gathered in. Frost nipped the air in the mornings, and the trees went up in flames of color. It was prime hunting season.

She knelt beside the brook and quenched her thirst. It was a good place to refill her water skin, even break for a light meal. She patted Thala’s velvet nose, earning a puff of hot breath on her hand. “Come on girl,” she nudged Thala to the water’s edge, and her horse took her time drinking and chewing on the weeds growing along the banks.

Something shifted in the deep shadows beneath the trees. Her hand went to her quiver, drawing an arrow and notching her bow string. An Elf stepped out. He was a Wood-elf by appearance, and yet wore armor of high quality that would have suited a Noldo, if the design wasn’t off. He was defiantly a Wood-elf though, just an oddball.

She tensed as he drew closer and she got a good look at his eyes. They glimmered in the darkness, reflecting all the light like a cat’s. Their split pupil also shared kinship with a cat’s. Or an Orc’s. 

Her eyes traced the silver scars raking down his face, a set of three down his right cheek and another set running from the crown of his brow down his left temple, just missing taking out his eye. Claw marks. It wasn’t a hideous disfigurement, for no chunks of flesh was missing, and they had healed well, only leaving those glimmering lines of silver that lend his face an air of mystery rather than horror. Those eyes unnerved her though.

But then she remembered herself, and shook off the disquiet. She wasn’t afraid of strange eyes. Obviously he’d been a thrall. Escaped or set loose though? He might be planning how he wanted to eat her now.

She lifted her bow, “Not a step closer or I shoot you through the jugular. I promise, I won’t miss. I am an _excellent_ shot.”

He halted his approach, but did not say anything for a long moment in which she held him in her sights, aim unwavering. She would kill him if he made the wrong move. She’d killed Elves more kin to her than he would ever be long ago on white beaches.

“What brings you into my forest?”

Well, at least he still had an Elven-fair voice. But that didn’t mean he’d not dropped to his knees before Morgoth, terrified into service. “Hunting,” she said, voice clipped. “Your forest, hmm? And who might you be?”

His face darkened. Her jaw set, body steeled for a kill. One wrong move. “I am Eöl, Lord of Nan Elmoth.”

She knew the forest’s name, but not its lord’s. She hadn’t realized the forest that had tempted her with thoughts of rich game was the one attached to that name. She really should have paid more attention to the maps of the East. But she had never planned to live here, and didn’t care to study what she did not need.

“And you are?” he asked.

Her mouth pinched. Uh-uh. She wasn’t giving an ex-thrall her name. “Why did you approach me? What do you want?”

“I want to know the identity of the Quendë who crossed into my lands.” It was his turn to pick up some bite in his words. Fair enough though, she had ignored his question, but that didn’t mean she was answering it now.

Quendë though, that was an ancient word not tossed around much anymore. Still an ex-thrall though. “As I said, I was hunting. But if you do not permit others to hunt your lands, I will take my leave now.” She let those words drop, settle, waiting for the reaction, her arrow still aimed.

The silence stretched as they stared at each other, not quite a challenge, more of an assessing gaze. “You are free to go,” he said at last. “Though I would have one question answered by you before you do, if you would.”

She held his eyes, giving no encouragement. She would hear this question, and then decided.

His strange eyes ran over her face, mapping it. She shifted under the intensity of the look. It was too close, too intimate, too much like he saw a loved one inside her skin. “Are you...” he stumbled, licked his lips, “are you kin of Finwë?”

Her eyes narrowed, “Why do you think so?”

His eyes darted over her face again, “You have some of his features. I thought…perhaps…” He looked away. She could see the tight line of his jaw clenching and unclenched.

“You knew him?” 

His eyes snapped back to her face. “Yes,” he whispered, “long ago, on the shores of Lake Helcar where the Quendi awoke, I knew him.”

She lowered her bow. And, after a moment’s hesitation, slipped the arrow back into her quiver. Thala had nosed closer in her hunt for the best weeds, and Aredhel patted her horse’s neck. She did not take her gaze off the Wood-elf. He was an ex-thrall, but she judged now he was not out to cut her up for his cooking pot. Few thralls crawled out of Angband not yoked to Morgoth’s power, but some did. Maedhros had.

“Yes, I am kin to Finwë. He was my grandfather.”

The Wood-elf’s lips parted, and his eyes flew back over her face, a hunger inside them. She supposed that was only natural if he had called Finwë a close friend. He took a step closer. When she did not recoil or redraw her weapon, he took slow, careful steps until he stood directly before her. He lifted a hand. It trembled. She watched curiously as he closed the distance to her face. She was not bothered by the touch, it was light, and he looked like a starving man. She let him trace the lines of her features, her nose, cheekbones, the shape of her mouth. 

Her eyes studied his as he worked over her face. No, the scars did not twist him into something hideous to look upon. He was short by caparison to the Noldor. The crown of her head came abreast of his. It was impossible to determine how slender his built was under the armor, but she bet it was lithe to match his height and Wood-elf blood. 

She liked his mouth. It was interesting. And his brows were a good pair for brooding without rolling over into bulky heaviness. Yes, a nice set of brows. Too bad about his eyes. But then, maybe that would add a layer of excitement? 

She wondered if he had more scars under his clothes. She wouldn’t mind undressing him and finding out. Wood-elves were usually fun in bed. She hadn’t had one in years. The Wood-elves of Gondolin had grown skittish of Noldor. Not a surprise given how they were treated, not that any of that was her fault. She had never mistreated any of her Wood-elf servants, and flipped coins at the hands of hungry-faced children when she walked the streets. But the fact remain, the Wood-elves of Gondolin would have made poor lovers. Now, the Wood-elves around Lake Mithrim had been good fun, and a select few were open to even the dirties fantasies she could think up. 

When he leaned forward to learn the shape of her mouth with his own, she kissed him back. It took forever to get all that armor off, and she nearly called it more trouble than it was worth, but he’d roused her, and she wanted her climax before she left. 

Finally, the armor was off, and she straddled him. She didn’t bother learning the answer to her question of what he looked like under his clothes, she just unlaced him and pulled his cock out. It wasn’t as big and glorious as others she’d had, but he was as lightly built as she’d predicted. 

She sunk down on him, and started riding him hard. He knew what to do with his hands, and was a surprisingly generous lover. He brought her to pleasure twice before finding his own. She was well pleased, and fell into a boneless sprawl on the forest floor, letting out a contented sigh. 

Sex. It was her favorite medicine to quiet the storm in her mind. She lay there, blinking lazily at the tree branching overhead, her mind washed blank. When he reached for her again, she was ready for another round. He really was a considerate lover. Not as creative as others she’d had, but he made up for it with the way he worked her body. He knew just how to please a woman.

*

Nan Elmoth had whispered to Eöl of the stranger wandered into the secret folds of his forest. He had followed Nan Elmoth’s pull, letting the magick of the forest guide him. The forest’s deep tree shadows arched up to greet him as he passed, rubbing themselves against their guardian. Leaves giggled at him, some falling in vibrate swirls of color to flirt with his hair and shoulders. Tree roots curled their gnarly fingers about his tunic, but did not try to pin their guardian in their arms, letting him walk freely where he would upon their breast.

His eyes pierced the deep darkness of his forest as easily as another Quendë walked through meadows in the sunlight. His hair and teeth had grown back long ago, and his body regained its strength, but his eyes and scarred skin would never unmake the changes Utumno had carved into them.

He had lived too long in dark pits of torment, and his eyes had morphed like one of the Lost. Like an Orc, or a predator of the night, his pupils had narrowed into slits and reflected the light in an eerie glimmer that sent shivers down so many Quendi’s spines and had them shirking from him. His eyes afforded him the ability to pierce deep darkness with ease, but he could not endure the light of the sun without pain.

His eyes revealed a female in white wandering his forest. He watched her as she crouched beside a brook, cupping her hand and bringing the mouthful of water to her lips. Her eyes did not stop flittering to the shadows. It was not fear, but the watchfulness of wise woodcraft. Her horse neighed and tossed its white mane. She shushed it with a gentle word in her sundered tongue, and stroked its nose.

She was fair to look upon, a willowy grace in the slenderness of her figure. This woman, though one of the Land-stealing Golodhrim, was a huntress. Yet Eöl’s eyes would not have been captivated by her if it were not for the dark luster of her hair, the high arches of her cheekbones, something in the point of her proud nose that layered a hint of his Finwë’s over her.

He crept closer. The forest shadows cloaked him, and the dark metal of his Galvorn armor hushed silent as Dragon skin as he moved. He stepped out of the tree shadows, and she looked up like a bird alerted to the soft padding of a fox. She had grey eyes. He did not halt his approach, but the frantic leaping of his purse in his neck slowed. He had thought blue like moonstones.

But his enthrallment with the idea of having her leapt to life anew, redoubled, climbed to the bounds of obsession when she told him she was of Finwë’s blood. She opened her body to him, and he slipped inside her as his eyes flew over all the features he matched to his Finwë’s. He was touching a part of his Finwë. 

When rumors spilled out of Doriath that Quendi from the West had returned and the name Finwë whispered on lips, Eöl had pounced on their trail, following the whispers North, so much blazing hope in his chest he thought his skin would burn itself up. The returned Quendi were no longer newly arrived by the time the rumors of them had swept to Eöl’s ears. They had built themselves a sprawling settlement around the lake, and seemed at first a wondrous people Eöl was eager to know more of as he watched their bustle and noise from the shadows. 

He looked and looked for his Finwë, but there were too many faces to find him, yet he dared not slink from the shadows and slip among them. They were not like the Quendi of his forest who looked passed his Orcish eyes and the silver scars slashed across his face, but nor were these Quendi akin to the Quendi who shrunk and fled from his face. These Quendi would not run away or pause to see that, tainted by Darkness though he was, he was not Lost. They were a war-like people. They would kill him for his Orc eyes, just as the Khazâd almost did on their first meeting.

Eöl turned to the Quendi tribes of the Hithlum. These tribes were not close in his friendship, but they had a common dissatisfaction with Elwë that had bound them together, though Eöl’s dislike of Elwë sunk far deeper coils around his heart than mere dissatisfaction with his leadership. Eöl was convinced Elwë’s Maia queen had murdered Elmo.

Elwë returned as if walking out of his grave. Not only had they all long believed him dead, but he returned to them changed. A spine-chilling uncanniness twisted and shimmered in the air around him, and at his side walked one of the not-Quendi. 

The Quendi wanted nothing to do with the pair of them, but Elwë’s hunger for dominance had not abated. He was determined to rule them, and Challenged Elmo for the right of chieftain. Elmo fought well, but Elwë emerged the victor and set himself up as their chieftain, calling himself _king_. Not only king of Elmo’s people, but king of all Beleriand.

There were many Quendi, like Eöl, who would not passively bow their necks to Elwë even if he’d emerged the victor of every Challenge. In his dominance, Elwë cemented the discontent against him, for he was nothing like Elmo who ruled them with a gentle hand of authority, never seeking to _force_ them into the dust as Elwë did. Talk began of leaving Doriath, following Elmo south to Taur-im-Duinath, or back East. Eöl was ready whenever Elmo passed down the word. He would not suffer Elwë’s heavy hand upon his neck.

The voices of those eager to leave grew, the time ripened, but into this moment of Elwë’s teetering authority, when his grasp upon the mighty kingdom he’d lusted for slipped, Elmo disappeared. Search parties were sent out, and the ancient shadow of the Dark Hunter cast itself over their hearts. No body was ever discovered, and in fear of that ancient terror wrapping its bulk around their necks, most of the Quendi allowed the lie of wild animals taking Elmo to be poured down their throats and obediently swallowed. 

Eöl swallowed nothing. His eyes watched Elwë’s queen from the shadows with suspicion deep rooted in his heart. Eöl did not suspect Elwë of killing his own Starchild, but Elwë chose to benefit from the death, and eagerly swallowed down the lies so suspicions would not turn to the sinister not-Quendi queen he’d brought into their homes.

With a small number of Quendi who respected him despite Darkness’ taint upon him, Eöl forsook Doriath, shaking its dust from his feet, though his chest weighed down with the boulder of Elmo’s murder. Never would he call a Quendë of Elwë’s character chieftain, much less king. 

Now he crossed into territory of the Standing-rock tribe in southern Hithlum. They were distant trading partners of his, and he came seeking answers. 

The Standing-rock tribe had few answers to give, only the passing of disquiet into his heart. The Standing-rock tribe spoke of how they had come to the returned Quendi, these Noldor, in friendship, for their hearts had been full of joy when the Noldor pushed the Dark from their lands. They had named the Noldor friend, and, though other tribes refused to relinquish their hold on a single farm or stretch of grazing ground, the Standing-rock tribe had welcomed the Noldor into their lands and given them many rich fields their Green Singers had been pouring themselves into for millennium. But, as the Noldor had settled among them, it became apparent that the Standing-rock tribe had offered their hands in friendship to an ungrateful, haughty people who were quick to look down on them and name them _lesser_.

These tidings troubled Eöl, but perhaps this was all that could be expected from Quendi who had lived so long in the lands of those who stole their faces for their own and murdered them in the dark. He must find his Finwë and Míriel. Even all these years sundered, he was sure they would not have been corrupted by greed and pride. 

A group of the Standing-rock hunters reluctantly agreed to seek out answers for him. He followed them from the shadows as they approached a hunting party of the Noldor. The Noldor had learned Sindarin, the universal trading language of Beleriand, though their tongues shaped the words with strange accents. Eöl observed from the shadows as the Noldor spoke with the arrogance the Standing-rock tribe had warned him of. 

The hunters asked news of Finwë, and the answer was delivered like common fact, like the hunters were too ignorant to be born for not already knowing Finwë, King of the Noldor, had been murdered by the Dark One. It was like one of Eöl’s nightmares had sprouted legs and chased him with the open, wet-fanged grin of an Orc. His lungs could not draw in air though the moment of their collapsing. There was no air left in the world. No light. All the stars had fallen from the sky. There was nothing, nothing but darkness, the yawning mouth of a void, a black hole sucking him in.

His nails bit into the tree trunk he’d collapse against. No, no, not the dark, not the dark, please! There was still one last star. Míriel had not gone out. Her soft arms and breast promised to pillow his tears as they clung together and wept out their broken hearts for Anneth was gone.

“Míriel,” he gasped out. Then louder, voice whispering from the shadows, “Míriel.”

The Noldor were ready to leap up and hunt down the voice hissing from the shadows, but the tribe’s hunters restrained them before they went plunging into the underbrush to drive Eöl before them like a doe before a pack of wolves. “He is scared of you,” they said, “your eyes shine so bright. He means no harm. He only sought tidings of those long sundered from him.” 

When the Noldor had been soothed, Eöl’s voice drifted again from the shadows, “What of Míriel? She who was Finwë’s mate? Has she returned from the West?”

The Noldor passed looks between them. Then one answered, “She passed into the Halls of the Dead long ago.”

There was no light left in the world, the darkness had eaten the last star. She who had been spun from starlight, birthed from the splendor of the star’s raiment, awaking naked and entwined with his body, his first and forever mate, his twin, the last light of his world, had gone out.

Only the darkness remained. It swallowed him whole. He knew nothing but its black pulse against his skin, its charred hands over his eyes, its saber-toothed fang in his heart. 

For two hundred years of the sun Eöl lay locked and entombed in darkness. He awoke in Breglos’ arms, in their bed in Nan Elmoth. He did not speak for days. He did not rouse from the bed. He found comfort only in Breglos’ arms. Only within their cradle did this pain eating him by chunks –fangs sinking into the tender flesh of his inner thigh, tearing a piece off, another fanged-mouth biting into his neck, feasting on him—unhinged its jaws from his broken-boned body.

It took months for him to return to himself enough to care about the world outside Breglos’ arms, though he rose and dragged himself through days, choked down meals, and folded himself up like a worn-out rag into Breglos’ arms at night. When he did, Breglos told him how the Golodhrim had spread from their Northern settlement by the lake, snatching up lands, driving the tribes out. He told Eöl of how the Golodhrim had come East and gobbled up more lands, building their stone cities, plowing the land, and looking down their haughty noses at Breglos and the chieftains of Himlad when they had been brought before their lord. 

The chieftains told the Golodh lord they had no right to these lands, that all the lands stretching from the Eastern Border of Doriath to the Ered Luin belonged to them. The Golodh lord claimed that Elwë gifted these lands to him in exchange for the Golodhrim’s defense of the North. They had struck a bargain, the Golodh lord said, as if Elwë had the right to give away _their_ lands (Elwë thought he did; he called himself King of Beleriand and had never acknowledged any other claim. But Denethor and his Green Elves had, and so too had the Khazâd.)

The Golodh lord refused to remove himself and his people. Instead he spoke of building alliances against the threat in the North, and asking what his people could do to ease this _conflict_ between them, as if the theft of their homes could ever be forgiven! Only it seemed some of the chieftains _would_ forgive it, and stayed to work out agreements with the Land-thief. But the free Elves of Nan Elmoth would never call greedy Land-stealers friend!

The Land-theft was not enough to rouse Eöl’s bitterness. He found it hard it bring himself to care with the passion Breglos burned with. Eöl found it hard to care about a lot of things now, but the stories upon stories of crimes committed against their people twisted like a knife in his mouth, and stung his tongue with bitterness. His love he would never give to the Golodhrim who had come out of the West on an ill-wind, and sown a path of suffering and injustice beneath their haughty, neck-grinding feet. 

Aredhel was Golodh, but also blood of Finwë. Eöl had lain with her beside the brook, running his hands over skin that Finwë’s seed had created. He’d believed in those first hours together that as long as she was by his side, her soft star-white arms winding about him, his head finding a pillow on her breast, a new star had been born in the night sky so black and void of starlight. He had thought they would take each other for mate, and built a home inside each other’s arms. 

The dream had not lasted the length of the day. She was not Finwë or Míriel. She was her own person, and Eöl’s desire to call her mate and never be parted from her waned as she revealed more of the soul burning restless under her skin. She was tolerable company. At least she did not look down her proud nose at him and see something lesser. She had not even flinched at the scars silvering his skin and gorging it in other places, nor shrunk from his Orcish eyes. But they had nothing in common, and their conversation dried up as he led her deeper into his forest to where his people dwelt. 

He’d put aside his dream of finding Finwë or Míriel’s likeness in her, but was not ready to part from her, for she carried a part of Finwë inside her. Let her dwell among them for a time. Let him breathe in the scent of her skin, bury his hands in her lush, black hair, and seek the faint hint of another’s mouth in hers. She would move on when the restless burn of her spirit carried her away on the winds of rushing feet.

The Wolf Clan had gathered together in the Stone Clearing. They arranged themselves in a circle two layers deep, exactly one hundred Quendi per layer. The third layer was but the first curve of a circle, far from complete. 

Today was a day of celebration. Lô had risen from her birthing bed with a healthy babe in her arms. She passed her newborn daughter around for them to admire and Sing blessings over. 

The babe’s father had come for the birth, traveling from Himlad where his people had built a settlement in the fertile farming lands along the River Aros’ banks. He stood beside Lô, arm linked with hers, dressed in the brightly-dyed cloth his people favored. The gold of his long earrings complemented his bronze-brown skin, and a round beaded hat was settled atop his shorn, black hair. Lô had already told the Wolf Clan of her intention to return to Himlad with him and raise their child among his sprawling family as she had none of her own.

The Gift Giving ceremony had already passed, and gifts piled atop the blankets spread just outside the circle. Eöl’s gift had been the first given and one he’d labored all the months of the pregnancy over.

In the very center of the circle a staked doe bled out into the earth. Death must pay for life. And the Land hungered for its due. But for now the Land slept, contented with their offering. It was not always so. Every score of years or so, the Land would stir and demand more than a simple animal sacrifice. That was the price for the Power it granted them. Not just the Wolf Clan of Nan Elmoth, but all the Quendi who reached for its Power when in need, whether that need was Singing life into a field lit only by starlight or Singing the roots of trees, the texture of the earth, the pollen of flowers, and the thickets of thorns into the shield and spear holding the Dark back. 

After Denethor fell to the Dark and it seemed all the world would burn, the Green Singers of Ossiriand had banded together in a desperate last defense as a host of Orcs led by Balrogs and Shape-shifters turned to swallow them whole with their army broken and their king dead. The Green Singers had sung with all the might in their lungs, and the desperation in their hearts, and the Land answered. Ossiriand awoke and, like an army of a hundred thousand warriors, it stood against the Dark Host and devoured all that dared set foot into that forest. Even Balrogs met their end when the ground opened up its jaws to swallow them whole.

But that kind of Power had a price, and it was here, in Nan Elmoth, in the Land’s heart, where the price was paid. The Wolf’s Clan knew themselves to be the guardians of all Beleriand, though none knew of their many sacrifices. When the Land stirred with hunger, it was they who fed it.

The Land would come to them in the form of a direwolf with golden eyes and a coat of silver-grey. While they bowed their necks to it and waited with bated breath as it prowled the circumference of the Stone Circle and made its desire know at its leisure. Sometimes it was mere blood it hungered for, and they would slit their wrists as one and hold them out for its tongue to lick up and soak into the ground and its flesh. But that was an easy sacrifice, and its favor was not cheaply bought, yet it did not take more than they could bear. It did not demand their children torn from their arms or a blade across their throats, perhaps it knew they would rather live without its favor than sacrifice the lives of the very ones they sought its Power to protect. 

Its most common desire was their sexual submission. This they would give the Land in exchange for its Power, though none gave joyfully, but it wouldn’t be a sacrifice if they had. The Land, in its direwolf form, would choose one among them to mount, and then another until its hunger was saited. 

Only once, after it expended itself in the protection of Ossiriand, did it demand more. It had taken Legang away with it, and when Legang returned it was not Legang looking out of his eyes. It was not Legang wearing his body’s skin. 

Eöl had gathered his courage because Legang was one of _his_ and he owed it to him, and approached the creature inside Legang’s body as it lounged near a patch of strawberries, eating them at its leisure and watching Nîdh as she Sang the sweetpeas into bloom with hunger in its eyes. Eöl had demanded to know what it had done to Legang. The creature turned its glowing golden eyes upon him and studied him like a human might watch the curious activities of a pet. It said in a voice that sounded like it was trying to force its way through the shape of Legang’s throat but unable to quite fit that it would leave when it had had its fill. Then it plucked another strawberry and took it into its mouth with the fluttering of its eyelashes as if savoring a long forgotten pleasure.

The creature did crawl back out of Legang’s skin, but Legang refused to speak a word of what had happened to him and he left Nan Elmoth for the East and never returned. Eöl did not know what he would have –could have—done if the Land had tried to take another of his people’s bodies, but it never had. 

The next time it roused with hunger it found Eöl when Eöl was alone mining the riches of the earth. It had not taken the direwolf’s form this time. Most of its body was Quendi, but it had a lion’s paws for feet and a lion’s tail. From its head curved a bull’s horns, and its teeth were a wolf’s fangs. Its eyes glowed like molten gold, and its hair hung unbound to its waist in a stream of gold, silver, and the white of stars. It hungered for its usual desire, and reached out to mount Eöl. 

Eöl never tried to refuse the sacrifice before, but never had he looked into the Land’s eyes and been struck by the terrible fear that this Power they had bowed themselves before was nothing more than one of the not-Quendi in disguise, one of the Vala in the West. He tried to turn and run like he’d run from the Dark Hunter, but it was just as useless, and he was caught and pushed down into the earth. The creature laughed, lowly, in his ear, and pressed into his mind, _Such fear, little wolf. Do you not know me? Have you not given yourself to me many times before?_

Eöl, belly a pit of horror, said, “You are one of _them_.”

He felt the creature in his mind, and struggled against it like he’d struggled against every one of the Dark Hunter’s invasions, but he was just as powerless and the creature broke him open. It said, _They are no kin of mine. How could you fear it so, little wolf? Would they do as I have done and lend you their strength? When have they ever given their aid to anyone? And no more am I kin of Melkor who hunted you. Have I not saved you from him time and again? Have I not saved you all?_

This was true, but still Eöl trembled under the Power holding him down. What could the creature be than if not one of the Powers that shaped Arda to their liking? 

The creature stroked his hair, traced down the line of Cirth inked into his spine, and cooed, _Why must every Power spring from their well? Have you touched the stars, held them in your palms, and judged them no more holy than a flower of the field? Yet there are those among your kind who look to the stars for protection and name them goddess. Have you taken all of me into your body, fed yourself on my Power, and tasted the stale, cold-hearts of those so-called-gods of the West? No, you have not. It is only that I took a form akin to yours that set this fear in your heart, when all I have done, all I have given you, is the inverse of all that they are._

It was so. Not even a glimmer of these suspicions sprouted in his mind before this Power had come to him with the face of a Quendi. And it was true that this Power did not act like the Valar in the West, for this Power had sought him out when the Valar had cast him out, not willing to abide even the shadow of him in their realm, tainted as he was. And it was true that this Power had lent them its strength to throw back the Dark Powers in the North seeking to enslave the world.

And yet…but Eöl silenced the doubt. The Land was all they had. Their shield and spear. He _needed_ the Land to be their protector and not another of the not-Quendi come to ensnare them, not the kin of the Dark Hunter who had taken them into the dark and feasted upon their souls. 

(Anneth, Anneth)

So when the Power sought Eöl’s body under its, Eöl did not fight. He lay still and cold until the sacrifice was over, and then he walked home and spoke no word of his fears into the air where they could grow substance and destroy them all.

Lô’s baby had found its way back into her mother’s arms, and the tension running through the shoulders of each member of the Wolf Clan began to ease as the Land continued to slumber, content with the doe’s blood. The shadow of a sacrifice passed over them like the sun breaking through a bank of storm clouds.

With the fear passed, his people began to speak of the source of discontent among them: Aredhel. She was a Golodh come into their home. He understood their hearts, but she was _Finwë’s_. He could not let her go; not even for love of them.

He listened to his people as they spoke of the Golodhrim and the many wrongs done to their people by that most haughty and greedy race. They asked him to hear their words and cast the Golodh out. They wanted her far from them. The Golodhrim would never understand them, and brought trouble and strife wherever they walked. Others held their peace, their hearts not overly troubled by the Golodh’s presence, but the meat of his people called on him to send Aredhel away, back to her own people.

Silence fell as his people awaited his response. His hand trailed over Thinfin’s head, fingers sinking into the wolf’s ash-grey coat. Morfin lay on his other side. The wolf’s tongue hung out as he tasted the air, ears swiveled to the gathering of Quendi, and gold-velvet eyes staring with the intensity of a predator.

Long, Eöl warred within himself. He was his people’s chieftain, he must look to their needs first; he refused to sink into Elwë’s self-serving ways. And yet his heart _yearned_. Aredhel was not Finwë or Míriel, but her coming was a sliver of light, like the glimmering of sunlight on quartz. He could not bring himself to blow out the light with his own breath.

“She will stay,” he spoke at last, voice grave, reflecting the unpopularness of the decision, “but not forever,” he continued when his people stirred, hisses loosed between the gaps of teeth. “She will not become one of us, and each will choose how deeply she looks into your heart. Speak to her not at all, if that is your choice. Invite her never into your home. Ignore her as you pass on a path. But do not be cruel and scornful, for we are not the Golodhrim who look down our noses at other Quendi. For a time, a few seasons if she chooses to linger that long, she has my permission to dwell in our forest and in my home.”

Hýril contended this last: “But your home is my home, Eöl. As it is Breglos’ and Tenwë’s, and others besides. Must we eat at table with this Golodh, and share such intimate quarters?” 

Hýril, like the others she named, enjoyed the feel of stone walls about her. Eöl had built a house many times the size of the one he’d shared with Finwë and Míriel on the lake shore, and under its roof all amongst his people seeking the comfort of a stone home found shelter.

“It is only for a few seasons,” Eöl reasoned. “I would never turn you from your home, but if you would be more comfortable living elsewhere until she leaves, I do not doubt one our people will open their homes to you, or you may make your home in the Wolfden.” 

Hýril did not look appeased, but she held her discontent behind her teeth.

“You will not see reason, will you?” Eöl’s back stiffened at Breglos’ words.

Breglos rarely spoke up when the Clan gathered in the Stone Clearing. An undercurrent of imbalance swung between Breglos and Eöl whenever he did, for it was an unacknowledged fact that Breglos should be chieftain of the Wolf Clan. He was the strongest of body, greatest in bowmanship, and more charismatic than Eöl. It was only because Breglos bowed to Eöl that Eöl was chieftain at all, for there were others among the Clan who could have ousted him in a Challenge if Breglos had not submitted to Eöl. 

Eöl turned his head slowly to where Breglos sat, holding the seat directly across from Eöl. Breglos met his eyes with a look cool as a forest pool reflecting the green canopy above. Breglos’ face had hardened to marble, and he threw down to shocked gasps, “I Challenge you, Eöl Starborn. I will not bend my neck to one who would bring a Golodh into our homes, like loosing a snake in our beds.”

Eöl’s jaw bit down _hard_ on his back teeth. How could Breglos do this to him? Breglos _knew_. Eöl had whispered his heart into Breglos’ ear, confessing that Aredhel was Finwë’s. How could Breglos who had called him from the darkness and pillowed Eöl’s head on his chest, who knew Eöl better than any other now living, let his hatred of the Golodhrim snatch the last of Finwë from Eöl’s arms?

“Very well,” Eöl shoved the words up through the tightness in his throat, “let the Challenge begin, and the worthiest to lead our people into health and prosperity triumphed.” The traditional acceptance of a Challenge fell rote from his mouth. At least he would not be required to say anything more before the Challenge was over. (And then? When Breglos had tossed Aredhel back to her people, what then? Would they pretend nothing had happened? That everything was the same between them, that this _betrayal_ —)

The Wolf Clan rose from their furs and retreated to ring the circle of small stones marking the border of Stone Circle. Each stone had been placed to form a geometrically perfect circle with a sold black, smooth stone interspaced between the white, splitting the circle into halves, fourths, and then eighths. 

Eöl stood to follow his people, but his belly hung with heaviness. His head pounded like a giant had taken it between its massive paws, compressing it, squeezing his skull until it shattered. Thinfin and Morfin shot up to fill the two spots on his heels like shadows, but Eöl snapped his fingers and pointed at the trees crowded up close to the clearing’s fringe. They bounded off at his command.

Súlmae, Breglos’ half-sister, steeped forward into the ring. She claimed the role of Breglos’ preparer. She would strip him, slick his body with oil, paint the circles into his chest, and offer her blood to the Land in blessing.

Írimial came to stand at Eöl’s shoulder, a silent request to fulfill the same role for him. He touched her shoulder in acceptance. He had no blood-kin amongst the Wolf Clan. He had only one left alive after Denethor’s death: Denethor’s daughter, Lainaras, who dwelt with the Nandor of Ossiriand where she was born. But Írimial was Eöl’s sister in the reckoning of the Starborn, for Breglos favored her and brought her to their bed on occasion.

While Súlmae began Breglos’ preparations, Írimial tugged the fur collared cloak off Eöl’s shoulders and folded it neatly in grass dotted with autumn leaves. Eöl unbuckled his belt and kicked off his boots. She returned to his side to lift the black tunic from his body. He shrugged it off, then stepped out of his black-dyed, buckskin leggings to stand naked. 

Before Utumno, he did not know what it was to be ashamed of nakedness. The Starborn awoke naked, and lived many star seasons before Míriel fashioned their first raiments, and those had been wore as decoration, never in an attempt to conceal themselves. But after Utumno, Eöl became painfully conscious of the scars marring his skin. He did not walk naked alone forest trails any longer, but kept himself covered, ashamed of his ugliness.

He forced his back to point a straight arrow to the sky, and his shoulders not to hunch like they whimpered at him to do. He thought sometimes that he had spent centuries curled in a ball in a dark pit, as if folding around his tender insides had ever spared him a moment of suffering. 

He shook off the blackness sucking at his soles. He had to hold his head high. For a few moments longer he was still chieftain of the Wolf Clan.

Írimial started slicking his limbs with oil. He held himself still under her touch; it was known to him and unthreatening. Her oak-brown hands bore the calluses of an archer, but they were delicate and small. All of her was small. Her chin only came up to Breglos’ collarbone. But Breglos was the tallest of the Clan, carrying Beleg’s blood strong in his veins. 

Oil applied, Írimial picked up a pot of dye made from the indigo plant, and with a fine-haired brush painted circles into Eöl’s skin. Three knotted around each pectoral, then another set ringing his navel, and finally three laced around the muscles just below the ball of his shoulders.

Írimial joined Súlmae in the ring’s center. They knelt in the grass together, sliced a thin line in each wrist, linked the fingers of both their hands, and called upon the Land to witness and bless the victor.

Magick writhed like snakes in the shadows and stretched languid as a cat in the tree boughs. A wind rustled the fallen leaves, picking them up in little whirlwinds, as sizzles of magick like electricity shivered its way down the Quendi’s spines. 

The wild magick of the Land’s Power ran throughout the world, connecting it, wrapping it up in cords of Power like a spider web cocooning a sphere. But Nan Elmoth was the beating pulse in the Land’s neck, the rhythm of its heat. It was Nan Elmoth that drew the murderess Melian here, to this forest out of all the forests in Middle-earth. It was in Nan Elmoth the Land walked in solid form. And Nan Elmoth that caused the Galvorn metal to fall from the stars and land _here_. It was not fate or some arithmetical prediction that had drawn it, but the teaming magick of this forest. 

If Eöl had not known his people were the first to call this forest home, he would have believed Nan Elmoth to be an ancient burial ground of the Quendi. Each soul wielded a Power of its own, and in death the Quendi joined with the Land’s Power and would one day be reborn through it.

Eöl remembered the fear death had once struck in him. The Starborn had stumbled through the world on the spindly legs of young fawns. They had had more questions than answers, and wrought more mistakes than successes. They had been children without teachers. But for all the heights the teachings of the not-Quendi had driven the Golodh to, and all the terrible, terrible mistakes the Quendi made in their ignorance, Eöl would never wish time could be unspun to plant a Vala there at the moment of their waking to draw them away from the starlight and freedom into fool’s gold promises of paradise.

The Quendi did not need the Valar to teach them the fate of their own souls in death; they had only needed time to learn it themselves. When Beleg and Breglos brought Eöl back to their people, Eöl learned of the Land and the fate of the Quendi’s souls. He was given a comfort so profound he wept. There was existence after death. There was the hope of rebirth. 

Anneth.

Anneth.

Anneth had died in his arms. She hadn’t been Anneth anymore, but he had kissed her snarling face as the monster inside her womb ate its way out. She died in agony, utterly broken, Lost. 

But the Lost were not lost forever. When Anneth’s _fëa_ unraveled from the twisted body of her corpse, it had born a corruption so deep the blackness had consumed the sunflower-yellow of her soul and turned it into a shredded, defiled thing. But there was one sliver of sunflower-yellow left, there, in its heart. 

Her _fëa_ had shivered and sighed away before his eyes, his hands reaching out desperately, but hopelessly to snatch her back. Where had she gone? Anneth. Anneth! The terror of her unexistence crushed him under the weight of bone-deep despair. 

He had had to watch, helpless, as other Lost ones _fëar_ unraveled from their bones, all glimmering with that last sliver of purity in a sea of corruption, and sigh away into nothing. None of the monsters born of the female’s ravaged bodies possessed a _fëa_. What ate their way out of the Lost one’s bellies was the soulless race of the Orc. Eöl had spent those years in torment and Darkness haunted by Quendi dying in his arms. Some Lost, some not yet broken into too many pieces to put back together again, but fading out from despair or grief, curling up to die like that the first Starchild whose heart had starved to death inside his chest.

But death did not mean unexistence. They lived on in the sound of wind rustling through the trees, the perfect bloom of a rose, the waves lapping the sand. And one day they would spin for themselves new bodies and dance barefoot through a meadow, breathless with joy, shinning sunflower-yellow.

Breglos stepped naked and slicked with oil into the Stone Circle. His ears were rimmed with tinny orbs of clear glass that glinted in the dim light, and his hair was caught in a high tail behind him, white as the moon’s belly. His shoulders blossomed out with breadth, his body a perfect balance between sleek muscles and a Golodh’s lion’s power.

Breglos stood a whole head taller than Eöl, and his sleekly muscled body outclassed Eöl’s. Eöl had the slender, brown body common to a Wood-elf. He was neither the taller nor stronger, and Breglos was every bit as cunning a fighter as he. He stepped into the circle knowing he would not step out the victor. 

They walked a slow circled around each other. Eöl looked into Breglos’ eyes, and found only hardened resolve and calculations on how to bring Eöl down. Eöl took the offensive, charging Breglos who darted away on swift feet only to double back around. Eöl danced back. He couldn’t let Breglos get behind him, or it was over.

Breglos struck out with a balled fist. Eöl caught it in his own fist, twisting Breglos’ arm sharply. Breglos hissed, but his superior strength worked in his favor, and he was able to break Eöl’s hold, shoving him with his shoulder. Eöl was pushed back a step, and Breglos took advantage and rammed his shoulder into Eöl, grappling him about the waist. Only the slickness of their oiled bodies kept Eöl from being thrown to the ground.

To break Breglos’ hold on him, Eöl rammed his knee towards Breglos’ groin, but Breglos blocked it with his own leg, hooking his foot around Eöl’s raised leg and overbalancing him. Eöl stumbled, but kept his feet, darting back to regain his balance. Breglos launched himself like a striking falcon, jumping high into the air to deliver a spinning blow to Eöl’s torso, sending him flying to land in a tumble of limbs. 

Eöl hit the ground with a grunt, but bunched his legs into his chest and kicked up, sending his body springing upright just as Breglos leapt the distance between them. Eöl ducked, Breglos’ leg snapping through the air only a hairsbreadth from his face. Eöl stumbled back. 

Breglos’ leg darted out to sweep Eöl’s feet out from under him, sending him crashing to the ground. Before Eöl could gain his feet again, Breglos pounced, straddling Eöl who bucked up under him. Breglos tried to grab hold of Eöl’s wrists and pin them over his head, but their slicked bodies saved Eöl again, and he was able to hold off final defeat a little longer.

But it was over. He knew it was over. Breglos would have him trapped in a moment. It was over before it began. Breglos would emerge the new chieftain of the Wolf Clan, and his first act would be to send Aredhel away. Eöl would lose her. He would lose Finwë. His Finwë.

He couldn’t—there was a black hole under his feet, waiting, fanged jaws circling in the Darkness, licking Orc-lips, ready to devour. He would lose his Finwë. He couldn’t bear—please. His heart was ripping from his chest. The Darkness hissed and laughed at him with the voices of Lost ones come to drag a corpse away and feast on its flesh.

The last light in the world was being eaten by the Devourer in the Dark, and the last star was falling from the sky. NO! They could not have his Finwë!

With the strength of desperation, the adrenalin of a battlefield pumping through his veins, Eöl’s thighs strained and he rolled Breglos onto his back. Then grabbed him, nails sinking into slick flesh, and flipped him onto his belly. He bore his weight down between Breglos’ shoulder blades, pinning him to the earth, and twisted one arm behind his back. 

He hissed, low as snake-language in Breglos’ ear, “You will not take him from me!”

Breglos stilled under him, the fight draining out, and he said, loud enough all could hear, “I yield.”

But it wasn’t enough. Breglos had tried to _steal_ Finwë from him. He had tried to drive him away! He had wanted Eöl on his belly under him, arms trapped in the chains of his grip, hand the heavy weight of dominance around his neck (the coldness of a slave collar). He had tried to hold Eöl down, imprison him, and force his will upon him.

(No please, please, no more! Please, why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to us? Please stop, please, it _hurts_. Finwë! Finwë, help me! Finwë!)

Eöl clamped his hand around the back of Breglos’ neck, right at that vulnerable spot between vertebrae where one powerful twist of his fingers would effortlessly separate them, breaking Breglos’ spine and ending his life. The neck went soft and submissive under his touch, but it wasn’t enough. 

The Darkness swirled in the corners of his eyes. Terror rippling through memories he could never outrun had been unloosed. He released Breglos’ arm and sunk his fingers into the oiled, supple flesh of Breglos’ hips. He pulled them up, spreading Breglos’ knees with his thighs. Breglos stiffened. Eöl snarled. See? Breglos had not submitted. He still thought about wrapping his own hand around Eöl’s neck and chaining him. 

Eöl entered Breglos without mercy. Breglos shuddered around him. But Breglos did not fight. His forehead bowed into the ground, exposing his vulnerable neck in complete surrender to Eöl. The submission did not soften Eöl, for the Darkness had slithered in with the sound of snake scales over dry grass, and hungry creatures that ate their way through bellies flashed their fangs, wet with blood, at him. And his Finwë was still dead. Dead. 

Dead.

Eöl left bruises in that moon-fair skin, and snarled like a Lost one (was he a Lost one? Sometimes he thought he was fooling himself to think he’d not broken in that black pit. _You have been touched by Darkness. Your soul is tainted. There is no place for you within Valinor’s Light._ ). He sank his teeth into Breglos’ shoulder as he released inside him, biting like a beast, like an Orc, like a Lost one.

And then he was Eöl again. Eöl who was lost but not Lost. Eöl who had just—Eöl was not _Elwë_. Eöl was not Orc. Eöl had hurt—he had hurt his Breglos. He had—

He stumbled to his feet. His eyes swung wildly around the circle of faces closing in, all staring at him like they saw the taint inside, like the Quendi at the lakeshore had stared when the nine crawled back to their not-home, like the Quendi of Doriath had stared and shrank away, some screaming, ‘Orc! Orc! Kill it before it eats the children!’

Eöl fled.

He ran through the woods, leaping fallen trees, flying fleet-footed and white-eyed as a hunted deer. But he carried the horror inside him. He could never outrun it. He never had.

He stumbled into the grassy bank of a stream, and curled up into a fist (he thought he’d spent centuries curled into a ball in a black pit). He bit into his kneecaps, breaking skin, tasting blood on his tongue. He rocked, holding himself tighter, aching for star-shine arms entwined with his on a hammock under the starlight, and another pair dark as dusk pressing the soft peaks of her breasts into his back. Anneth. He’d turn, one arm still looped about Míriel’s waist, and sink his hand into her hair, marveling at the way it fluffed like a cloud, and dark ringlets would cling to his fingertips. She would smile at him with the taste of sunflowers shinning between her teeth. Then Finwë would be there, climbing in beside him, tall, long body spooning up against Míriel’s back, and he’d smile at Eöl, reach out and cup the shape of Eöl’s chin, run his thumb over the curve of his cheek. Then pull him in for a kiss, their first true kiss, a kiss that tasted of the promises mates whispered into each other’s ears as they lay curled heart-to-heart.

Breglos found him weeping into his knees, keening like a wounded animal. Breglos scooped him up into his arms, and pillowed his head against his chest. “Shh, shh, now. I have you.”

Eöl’s fingers scrambled against Breglos’ back, clinging, trying to lose his face in Breglos’ skin, sink passed muscles and breastbone into his heart. “Sorry, sorry, Breglos. I’m—”

“I am not hurt. All is forgiven.”

Eöl pressed closer, closer. What if he’d lost Breglos? What if Breglos had turned his face from him, or looked upon him and seen an Orc? What if Breglos had said he would never hold Eöl again? What if he lost his Breglos? He squeezed Breglos so tight around the waist Breglos gasped. “Don’t leave me! I am sorry! I am sorry! Please don’t leave!”

“Of course I am not leaving you. We are mates. I never want to be parted from you,” Breglos dropped kisses into Eöl’s hair, his brow, working his way down the tip of his nose to his mouth. Eöl kissed him back like he would be lost without him. He would be. There was no Eöl without Breglos. There was only darkness. 

He pulled back to clutch at Breglos’ shoulders and search his face with desperate eyes, “I hurt you.”

Breglos shook his head, smoothing his thumb over Eöl’s cheekbone, “There was some humiliation to have it happen before the eyes of the Clan, but none can say it was not a risk I took when I Challenged you.”

“No, no,” Eöl’s fingers clutched tighter. “You did not know. That was Elwë. Not Eöl. You did not think your Eöl would hurt you like that. That he could turn into a beast, a—a Orc—” 

“Oh, Eöl,” Breglos pulled Eöl back against him, tucking Eöl’s head under his chin. “I knew. But you are not an Orc. You are a Quendë who was hurt so deeply and foully that what they did to you will never let you go. But you are not an Orc. Never.”

They lay for a moment, Breglos stroking Eöl’s hair, the slope of his back, Eöl holding Breglos in the tight clutch of his arms. Then Breglos whispered in his ear, “I am sorry. I should not have Challenged you.”

The silence stretched. Finally, “Why? Why did you do it? You knew…you knew how much I…”

“Because I could not stand the thought of you bringing her to our bed. Of how you would bring her again and again until one day she never left, and her body in our bed became a wall shutting me out, shutting the two of you in together. You would not have needed me anymore if you had her.”

Eöl turned his mouth and pressed a kiss into Breglos’ collarbone. “I could never not need you. You are my mate from who I will never part.”

Breglos swallowed, then murmured, “Only until they are reborn. I know their place far eclipses my own.”

Eöl closed his eyes and squeezed Breglos closer. He had not known these doubt slithered and hissed their poison in Breglos’ ear. And yet, he could not deny that his first mates did eclipse Breglos’ place in his heart. But that did not mean it would not shatter him to lose Breglos. Who he was, the pieces of himself he’d sewn back together into this jumbled mess, revolved around Breglos like a planet its sun. There was no Eöl without Breglos. He told Breglos this, his fingers caressed the valley of Breglos’ spine. He peppered kisses into his neck, and told him. And he said, “One day they will walk in life again, but on that day you will be there walking beside us. I do not know if they will take you for their mate. I do not even now if they will seek me on their return, but you will always be mine.”

Breglos kissed him, and laid him back in the grass. Eöl took Breglos between his spread knees, and wrapped his legs around Breglos, pulling him in closer. Breglos touched him like he was awe and wonder. He pressed his lips into scar tissue, and traces their silvery paths across Eöl’s skin. He looked into Eöl’s eyes as he had him, and found something beautiful inside their ugliness.


	34. Chapter 29

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 29

Aredhel was nothing like Finwë. This became more apparent every night they lay together, which had tapered off into only a handful a moon-cycle. She had grown bored of him, and he had grown disillusioned. There was no taste of Finwë hiding inside her mouth, waiting for his questing tongue to lap up like ichor. 

Aredhel wandered to other beds, seeking the excitement Eöl no longer provided her. She cycled through the beds of those Clan members willing to lay with a Golodh. She had lingered six months with them now; he did not expect her to last the year.

When she left, she would not take Finwë with her. Finwë had never been there to begin with. Eöl saw that now.

He did not send her on her way prematurely though. She had caused no problems and was not haughty and scornful of their ways like other Golodhrim. She took no interest in their lives outside of casual friendships, but that was how the Wolf Clan preferred, it even after they thawed towards her. 

She reminded Eöl of a bird that had been caged, but now free, raced across the skies tying to be everywhere at once, and soak up every scrap of life that had been denied her for so long. Sometimes, though, she reminded him of a bird that flew too close to the sun. There was no self-control in her, no _enough_. 

She drank too much wine, and had to be carried by her current lover to bed. She danced until she collapsed. She rode her horse through the forest at reckless speeds, and threw herself into wrestling matches, causing herself injury when she would not _yield_. 

This hunger inside her for everything at once looked like fleeing, not freedom. Some days though she was calmer, and sat through a whole meal at table before dashing off to the next entertainment. But one day soon she would ride out on her horse and never return. It would probably not even be a premeditated thought, but as impulse-based as all the rest. 

After Eöl had been the one to force the issue of her acceptance into their forest, he’d felt bound to linger these last months in Nan Elmoth to untangle any messes her presence amongst them cause. But now she had carved out a small place amongst them, he followed the call in his blood and left the forest on a trading expedition. Breglos accompanied him as he ever did. Eöl could not bear to be parted for him. The night terrors crouched in the dark, ready to pounce without Breglos’ arms to hold them back. 

He refused to tell Breglos what he was working on no matter how many times Breglos asked. Not this time. This time was special. 

Curiously lit a burn under Breglos’ skin when Eöl announced he needed to travel to the sea and trade with the Foam-riders. “Why?” Breglos asked. 

“I need pearls. Lots of pearls.” Breglos stared. Opened his mouth. Closed it. Then, “ _Pearls?_ ” he asked like he thought Eöl had lost his mind, as well he might for Eöl had not crafted a work of beauty since he’d bathed Finwë in jewels. 

They set off to seek the sea. Eöl could have traded for all the pearls he desired in Doriath, but had refused to set foot in that place since Elmo’s murder. He could have traded with the Golodhrim as well, but Eöl had no trade alliances with them and never would. The Khazâd would have pearls, but the prices would be exorbitant and beyond Eöl’s reach. 

The Wolf Clan had little wealth in coin, and what trade lines they had were based on the work of their hands and Eöl’s mining of Nan Elmoth’s mineral and ore deposits. But he would have his pearls. And the white gold he wanted for the threading, and the diamonds and ivory. He could trade with the Foam-riders for the ivory as well, and fetch a better price than with the Khazâd. But unless the Foam-riders were besotted with the works of his hands, he would have to travel back East to the Khazâd for his other needs.

Aredhel had asked him before he left to pick her up some white dresses and an assortment of other desires she’d compiled on a list. He looked down the list, brows rising. And how was she planning to pay for all this? She scowled, snapped the list back, and scratched out half before handing it over again. He scratched out half again, and told her he would purchase white cotton and she could sew the dress herself.

She had not flounced off in a huff or stamped her foot like a pampered princess. She told him smartly that she would see to it, just bring her some cotton. It was thoughtlessness and a life lived accustomed to ease that had had her writing down her every whim, not spoiledness. She simply hadn’t stopped a moment to think of where the money to pay for her whims was coming from. He would have been less stingy with her requests if she did not have the wealthiest family of Quendi in Beleriand to see to them just on his forest’s other side.

Six months later, when Breglos and he returned loaded down with the successes of their expedition, Eöl was surprised to find Aredhel still dwelling amongst his people. He handed over the goods he’d purchased for her, eyeing her buckskin tunic and calf-length red wool skirt. By the sloppy beadwork alone he knew his people’s skilled hands had not fashioned them, which left Aredhel herself. She rolled her eyes at him, “What? My dress was falling apart at the seams.” She scooped up the purchases and swirled away, black hair sailing out behind her.

Eöl set to work in his forge. He pulled out the sketch he’d made after he’d dreamed in Breglos’ arms that day by the stream. He’d dreamt a work of beauty centuries after he’d thought that part of himself capable of crafting beauty had died in Utumno. 

He spread the sketch out on his workbench. It had faded after months of his fingers tracing over every line with something like reverence. He opened the sack of pearls. They glimmered luscious and luminous in the light. 

He ran his hand though them. They fell like rainwater through his fingers. He smiled, and set to work.

He arranged the final piece on a wire bust so the necklace’s full glory could be admired. It ringed the neck snuggly and flared out to the shoulders’ tips, dripping strings of peals, carved ivory beads, and diamonds on white gold chains delicate as a strand of hair. 

The entire sack of pearls now resided on the necklace. The pearls were beaded globe to globe on the necklace’s collar, but fanned out and intermingling with the diamonds and ivory as the chains of white gold marched down the collarbone. It was exactly as he’d envisioned it, alluring as starlight and soft candlelight, lush as the petals of a white rose, and only failing in loveliness because it was not adorning Breglos’ skin as it had in Eöl’s dream. 

Eöl put all in readiness, then led Breglos out to the clearing, pulling him on with their linked hands when Breglos asked, laughing, where he was being dragged off to and for what scandalous purpose. Eöl curved a grin back at Breglos over his shoulder, and teased he was stealing him away for the very worst. Breglos laughed, teeth white, full mouth curved up in a smile Eöl wanted to kiss. 

A bird flew high and free inside his chest, and he thought his shoulder blades could sprout wings. Wonder washed him like rebirth. In this moment, caught inside the cradle of Breglos’ laugher and the sparkle of his eyes, he forgot black pits of despair. He forgot the smell of Lost ones circling in the darkness like hyenas, and the sounds of ripping flesh when those fangs tore into Quendi corpses, feasting on their once-kin. In this moment there was only Breglos and Eöl, and the anticipation fluttering up into Eöl’s mouth, filling it with sweetness as he imagined the exact shade Breglos’ cheekbones would flush when he beheld his gift.

They broke into the clearing and slowed to a lazy stroll, their hands clasped. Breglos’ eyes flitted between the wire bust Eöl had covered with a sheet and the long looking glass he’d hauled from the house. “Why is there a mirror in the middle of the clearing, Eöl?”

“You will see.”

He led Breglos up to the bust. He’d opened a pocket of sunlight in Nan Elmoth’s cloud cover. The forest canopy blocked out most of the sunlight naturally, but not all, and Eöl’s eyes could not abide the touch of the sun without pain. But for the reveal, he’d risked a little light, just enough to illuminate the necklace in all its glory.

He wanted to see Breglos’ face, so he positioned Breglos directly in front of the bust and circled behind it to grab a fistful of the sheet. He met Breglos’ eyes. They were green as spring’s first bloom. “I made this for you. It is a gift.” Then, without awaiting Breglos’ reply, he pulled off the sheet, revealing the treasure below.

Breglos gasped, mouth parting. He stared, struck speechless. Then his eyes rose to Eöl’s, awe there, but also confusion. “You—you cannot give this to me. It belongs on a prince’s neck, not—and, Eöl, the _cost_! It must be worth more than all of Nan Elmoth combined! I cannot—I am not…I am not fit.”

Eöl stepped around the bust, and picked up Breglos’ hands. They were strong and beautiful, just like their owner. Breglos was wrong. It was Eöl who was unfit. “What makes a prince that his neck should be more fitting than yours? A Challenge won millennium ago? I have watched many _fëar_ fly houseless from their bodies, Breglos. Naked and houseless there is no difference between princes and fisherfolk.” Breglos’ eyes had forgotten their distress to look upon Eöl with softness, and a lovely smile tucked inside the corner of his mouth. “I did not make this for a prince, nor can I think of a single princely neck it would please me to see it adorn. I made it for _you_. And found great joy in the making, and even greater in the giving. Now,” he dropped Breglos’ hands, “remove your tunic. It will look all the fairer against your skin.”

Breglos offered no more protests, and set about shrugging out of his tunic. Eöl turned and lifted the necklace. He settled it against the cream of Breglos’ skin, and slipped around behind to fasten the clasp of the collar closed. 

He ran his hands through Breglos’ hair, arranging it. Then curved around him to admire the stunning picture Breglos made with his hair tumbled loose about his shoulders, as pale a white as the pearls, and the way the necklace glimmered radiance in the filter of sunlight. The deepest string of white gold dipped low enough passed Breglos’ collarbone to tease the mouth of the valley between Breglos’ pectorals. Breglos had lovely pink nipples that had pebbled under the caress of the soft breeze.

“You are so beautiful,” Eöl breathed. He had no idea at times like this why Breglos had chosen him when he could have had _anyone_. “Come,” he trailed his fingers down the smooth milk of Breglos’ inner arm, dipping into his wrist, before linking their fingers together. “I want you to look at yourself.” He drew Breglos to the mirror, and enjoyed the delicious sight of Breglos’ cheeks pinking like blushing seashells. “You see,” he whispered, fingers running down the silk of a wisp of pale hair, “you are stunning.”

Breglos turned his eyes away from the vision he made to Eöl. He took Eöl by the hips and drew him in for a slow, sensual kiss. When their mouths parted, he breathed into space between them, “Thank you.” He lifted a hand and traced the side of Eöl’s face, following its dips and angles, “Why though?”

“Because I could not put the shape of you into words. It grieved me when I realized you did not know –did not see…I do not see either. But now, now I do. I…” Eöl stumbled, licking his lips, lashes dropping, shy to voice his heart. “I see now that the space you fill here,” he touched a hand over his heart, “is every bit as large as the one given to Míriel, Anneth, and Finwë.”

Breglos sucked in a long, shaky breath. He leaned forward and kissed Eöl. He led Eöl by the hand deeper into the tree shade so the sunlight would not irritate his eyes, and took them down into the grass. 

He spread himself out under Eöl, cradling Eöl’s body between his legs. Eöl looked down at him, a tangled mess of white hair against the grass like a splayed starfish, his skin glowing like pearls. The necklace was blessed to be clasped intimate as a kiss around his neck and able to adorn a body like Breglos’. And yet, when Breglos looked up at him, Eöl did not feel the rough edges of his own skin. He never did. Breglos had this way of looking at him that made him forget he’d once crawled out of the black belly of the earth. Here in the space between their eyes as Eöl moved inside Breglos, there was only room for Breglos and Eöl. The memories of horror would be silent, Breglos was taking care of his Eöl now, and he commanded them to be gone.

*

Aredhel woke. One of Ewdil’s arms draped her waist. There was no comfort to be found in its curl, or in any of the arms she’d fallen into since entering this cursed forest.

She could taste the wine from last night’s over-indulgences on her tongue, and feel the stickiness of dried seed on her thighs. She must have woken like this a hundred time, five hundred, since losing herself in this forest. Why hadn’t she gone home? If she had gone home, she wouldn’t now be—

Her mind shied away, flinching as if from a blow. She would crawl out of the current tangle of limbs, get her horse, and ride home. If she could just make it home, everything would be—

Her father’s face etched with disappointment as he looked at his failure of a daughter and understood that _she_ was not the one who would raise—she was leaving, running away, a wild, fleet-footed doe. And leaving behind—

Her hands balled into the furs, nails sinking in. She did not touch herself _there_. But she could feel it—him. It was a him. She’d known it for weeks now. She hadn’t wanted to know. She’d slit the throat of every thought turning back it the…the _it_ growing inside—

This should have been impossible. She’d never needed the herbs like other women to prevent...mistakes. She had been a Finwëion born in the Light of the Trees. Her body had been hers to command. She had lost count of how many she had lain with, and couldn’t have counted even if she’d tried, for when her titan rampaged through her mind she was some other woman, not her enough to remember what her titan did through more than flashes of memory. 

An adult Elf should never suffer memory loss. Maybe she didn’t _want_ to remember. The past was a haze of pain. Don’t look back.

Had she really been lost in this forest two years, caged like a rabbit in a trap behind the fences in her mind? Two years spent running, laughing too loudly, drinking too much, fucking any body within reach, each fuck granting her a moment’s numbness before the storm swept her back out to sea, but never a moment of comfort. There was no comfort to be found within the arms of these strangers. Only her family, her father, could weather the tempest, plunge in after her, and pull her up from the depths she drowned inside.

Father. She wanted to go home. She wanted his arms. But his face, his eyes when he understood. Understood she was running from this too, that she was leaving it behind for him to deal with, pick up the pieces after she’d stormed through like he always had to. She couldn’t bear such a look from him. 

He wouldn’t care that the sire was some nameless man, for she had no idea whose face to attach the seed to. She’d lain with every man and woman in this forest who offered, but her father would not have judged her. He alone understood and accepted her unconditionally. But she didn’t know how to be a—

She’d never wanted this. She’d never wanted children. All she knew how to do was run away. 

But her father wouldn’t forgive that. Anything else, but not this. Not leaving the…the _child_ like a discarded dress on the floor, unwanted, turning her back, and running away. He would not understand this. He would never love her the same way again after she abandoned the child. The boy. Lómion. 

He smelt like creation and wild woodlands. She didn’t know what he looked like, she hadn’t dreamt that far. She had been pretending she hadn’t dreamt his name weeks ago. She couldn’t breathe around the shape of it, the size of this thing growing inside her, its colossal weight, its lodestone mass. 

She didn’t _want_ it. She didn’t know how to carry it. It was so _heavy_.

So she closed her eyes and slipped from the weight of her body sinking under the sea like a whale carcass, and into another life, Aredhon’s life. Aredhon, who was more fortunate than ever, for he had not been born with a womb.

The Clan noticed the change. She hadn’t thought they’d lift a hand to help. It was not as if she meant anything to them, or they to her. They were not family, not even Noldor. But the healer came and tried to pry her out of bed to examine her, asking probing questions of what ailed her. 

Aredhel wanted to be left alone in her dreams. This world of waking was grey as dying light, colorless and unlovely. It smelt like the dead things rotting on the bottom of the ocean, entombed down there in a mass grave. The scent of decaying fish and the corpse of a whale whose blubber had turned to stone and sunk it to the ocean-floor graveyard rubbed its stench all over her waking mind.

She wanted to run away into her dreams, so she cut the healer’s pestering off with the truth: she was with child. 

A pause, stretching out into the grotesque shapes of fish skeletons with empty eye sockets. Then the inevitable question of who the sire was, and Aredhel’s answer: she neither knew nor cared. But the healer wouldn’t just let her be, and had to shame Aredhel with the reality of this ocean-graveyard she did not want to face: if Aredhel’s spirit did not have the strength to nurture the child alone, the child needed the sire’s or it risked being born stunted.

The smell of creation and wild woodlands. A child of twilight. She did not want it –him—but she did not want it hurt either. When it was out of her, she’d find the strength to pick herself up from this bed and take it to her father. 

She even found herself opening her arms for her titan, calling it back. Her titan was dangerous and reckless, but had the strength to take them home. But her titan came at its own will. It was the mistress here. 

She wanted to be left alone, but she had just enough of the woman she’d once been (ever been?) to struggle up from the bed and seek the sire. She found she did not have the energy to track every male she’d lain with over down, but the healer went to fetch Eöl so he could call the males who’d lain with her together. Each one could lay his hand over her belly. (There was the slightest hump already swelling it. She had pretended it was not there.) The child would know the touch of its sire’s _fëa_ , and was far enough along now to communicate its joy with Aredhel. (She had slit the throat of every thought edging towards the flicker of that tinny _fëa_ threaded inside of hers.)

Eöl returned from his forge. He found her in the front room, seated on a plain wooden chair in this room that would not know beauty if it slapped it in the face. 

She imagined the faces of those snobbish Gondolin ladies if they had been dropped into this room with its wolf-pelt rug, unremarkable, grey stone walls, and plain furnishings, not a scrap of gold or precious jewel in the room. They would have been appalled, and gathered up their silk skirts as if they’d catch some disease. Aredhel would have grinned at the thought of their horrified faces if the taste of whale bones did not coat the inside of her mouth.

There was no judgment in Eöl’s eyes. (Turgon would have judged her; the man he’d become.) These Wood-elves weren’t cursed with the memory of the Valar’s teachings, and did not know the scorn she would have reaped among her own people if she’d announced she had no idea who the sire was, she’d slept with so many men. 

Eöl told her he’d call his clan together, and made to walk out of the room, but paused, turning back. He hesitated, then asked if there was a chance he was the sire. He did not look eager for a positive answer. 

She considered it, shifting through hazy memories. How long since they’d last lain together? There was that one time when he’d come across her in the woods right after a kill. It stood out in her memories, for the sex had been heady and primal. 

She’d had a coating of doe blood on her hands, the high of the kill throbbing like a cock already inside her. She’d wanted one. So she lifted her skirts with bloody hands, and told him he should come fuck her. They’d fucked in the grass, the doe’s blood slowly seeping from its body. Her hair had been wet with it in the end, and there had been blood on his hands too, and smeared on his cheek.

That was the first time they’d fuck in months. She would seek him out at times when she picked up a craving for his generous hands, but preferred wilder bedmates. She told him now that there might be a chance, she did not know how far along she was. He nodded, no enthusiasm on his face, but no disgust either, and crossed to her. He laid his hand over her stomach.

Oh.

It seemed there was no need for a gathering of her bed partners.

She stood. Now that was decided she longed for nothing but her bed and escape. As she was headed for the door, he asked how she preferred him to come to her. She didn’t want to think about the child anymore, but the whole point of calling him was to deal with her own inadequacies. She was already failing as a mother and the child hadn’t even been born. 

She told him, frankly, that she knew little of pregnancy. How did the sire usually strengthen the child? He laid down some options. She didn’t have the energy for most. She chose the one that at least _she_ wouldn’t fail at, for it required nothing of her. He nodded, and said he’d come to her after he was done in the forge for the day.

She retreated to her bed and escape. She woke when she felt the bed dip with the weight of another body. She couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes. Aredhon’s life glimmered behind her eyelids like sunlight on a dew-dropped web. 

His body spooned up around hers, and his hand curved over her waist to cup the little bump of her belly. The dreams pulled her back under. She did not have to smell decaying fish and feel the weight of a whale corpse body. She could slip away while he set to the task of feeding his strength to the child she had already failed.

Days, weeks, months rolled passed. She struggled to rise from the bed to see to the most basic needs of self-care. It was only the thought of further harming the child that had her choking down all the meals set before her. The healer was her main caregiver, but Aredhel was not a fool. The woman had never liked her, and liked her no better now she carried Eöl’s child. Aredhel did not think it was jealousy over Eöl, just distain for a Noldo. 

Breglos, on the other hand, was jealous. He’d been courteous to her but never warm before the child’s existence was announced. But after he learned she carried Eöl’s child, his eyes scraped ice over her whenever they were in the same room together. Aredhel would have cut out her womb and thrown it and the child within in his face and let _him_ carry Eöl’s child if he wanted it so badly. She wished she could have. Then she would be free of this lodestone around her neck.

The worst dreams were the ones of the child. She didn’t want to dream of him. She didn’t want to see the face of the boy she would fail –had already failed. She shoved them down, slit the throat of every tortured thought, and sunk into Aredhon’s life. Or sometimes she’d dream she was a falcon, freedom gulped down her lungs, flying so swift and high, leaving the tangled dark forests in her mind far behind. 

Her titan had slunk away to a corner when she needed its strength, its courage, its daring. Even after the child was out of her body and a squalling infant pressed into her arms, suckling at her breast, her mind felt heavy as a mountain range, each stone a regret she’d swallowed, dragging her down, down into a graveyard of fish bones and decay. 

She looked into the tinny face of this child, her child, and somehow that tenderness rising up in her throat just made everything worse because she would fail him. She was always failing. She would be as terrible a mother as she was a daughter, sister, aunt.

She had to find the strength to deliver him into the strong, steady arms of her father who never failed anyone. But thoughts of Father and home brought the look she would plant in his eyes when she walked away. That last hand reaching out to her in the storm would sink beneath the surface, withdrawn, and she would lie in the coffin of the sea for eternity, washed in the scent of decay and trapped in the white ribcage of a whale’s bones.

Her mind opened and closed like a hinge. She would surface with its opening, and struggle to walk through the waking world in her whale carcass body. Then sink down into dreams of escape when the hinge swung shut. 

She would not rise from her dreams even when her son called her with his wails of hunger, or voices tried to pull her back, or hands exposed her breast and fed her nipple into a greedily, suckling mouth. She was far away, soaring over the peaks of mountains, clouds the air in her lungs, or lulled into the closest thing she had to comfort in the cradle of another’s life, one who made all the right choices.

Lómion stopped needed her breast, and grew into other needs. He was her lodestone, a fist of guilt every time she looked into those dark eyes, but he was also the sweet scent of baby-soft skin under her fingertips as she traced his arm, his little body curled into her side on the bed. She’d tell him stories her father and mother had told her as a child, and stories about her family, his family, his uncles and grandfather, and how wonderful it would be when they left here and he met them for the first time. She told him of Valiant Fingon, Noble Fingolfin, and Loyal Turgon (substituting the man he’d become with the man he once was). She told him of Fingon’s smile like sunshine and Fingolfin’s warm hugs, and how much they’d adore him when she took him home to them. 

She fed him her love that was never enough but all she had. He gobbled up every drop. He’d hang on her every word, eyes dark and watchful, little fingers playing with her hair, curiously tracing the shape of her face. He’d whisper in their secret language to her, and practice his Tengwar like a sacred ritual, faithful every day to continue his lessons even when she was lost inside the forest of her mind and did not answer his call. 

He was the perfect child. He never threw fits or screamed for her attention. He obediently applied himself to every task she set, and would play quietly on the floor with his toys or practice his writing or drawing when she lay on the bed, flying far away from her broken mind and whale-boned body.

He never squirmed from her arms when she needed to hold him. He would slip his arms around her, those skinny limbs, and look into her face with his serious one as he promised he would take care of her, she didn’t need to be sad. She pressed him close, kissed his plump cheeks, and whispered how much she loved him, her little prince.

She kept him close, even on days she was no mother to him at all. Eöl spent his days working in his forge and took little interest in Lómion’s raising. He only involved himself when he thought she was failing as a mother. (She was, but that was between Lómion and her.) 

Eöl wanted Lómion to have a caretaker from among his people, but she would not have it. For _this_ she roused enough energy to throw her voice back at his. The Wood-elves were fine for bed partners or friends when Lómion was older, but she would not have him raised by one. He was a Noldo prince, and one day soon she would find the strength to carry him away with her back to her father’s arms. 

Lómion was young enough still that she could keep him close, locked away in her rooms with her and the rest of the world shut out. In the evenings Eöl would return and fetch Lómion to dinner. Breglos tended to Lómion’s bath and saw him tucked into bed on the days Aredhel did not have the energy to see to her son’s needs herself. Eöl did not try to pry Lómion from her grip, letting things lie as Lómion was content to remain in his mother’s care.

But Lómion was five years old now. Time slipped between Aredhel’s fingers as she languished in her tomb of a mind, unable to break free and find the strength to sweep Lómion up in her arms and fly home with him. She needed to leave. Lómion was growing up. He would need proper tutors soon to give him a Noldo prince’s education. 

While she’d tried to protect his young, impressionable mind from adopting Wood-elf ways as his own, he had picked up some ideas that would serve him ill when he reentered his people’s society. She would not have him mocked or ridiculed. He would suffer enough prejudice as a half-blood bastard. He could not afford to act and think like a Wood-elf too.

She struggled to open her eyes through the weight dragging against her eyelids, hooked inside her mind. She could hear Lómion softly moving his toys around on the floor, whispering to them in Quenya. She caught Fingon’s name. Her heart clenched. He was playing heroes again. 

She had carved him wooden figures in as close to a Noldo knight’s appearance as she could with her limited skills, and horses too. A hero needed his trusty steed. And for the villain in the tale, she carved Orcs and Giant Spiders for the Noldo knights to defeat.

Lómion had carefully painted his wooden toys. He’d painted golden ribbons in one of the Noldor knight’s hair, and declared that one his uncle Fingon. He had a Fingolfin knight and an Aredhel one too, and one to play himself. Lómion was always there with his family fighting the evil Orcs and spiders, one of the heroes in the tale.

She managed to drag her eyes open, and watched him trot one on the mounted knights across the floor. The knight’s black eyes betrayed it as the Lómion Knight. Fingon rode up at his side, and Lómion’s whisper dropped low in an imitation of his uncle’s voice whispering to Knight Lómion.

Lómion had a quiet smile curled in the corners of his mouth as he played. He looked perfectly content. But Aredhel could not scrub out the look in his eyes last night when he crawled into bed with her to ask for a story in his soft voice, and she had turned him away, telling him to go play with his toys, she was tired. Only the words hadn’t come out right. They’d twisted all wrong: _I am tired of you_. She had said that. She had told him he wearied her. 

It was not the first time. She never meant…but she could not snatch the words back, and did not have the strength to chase him back into her arms when he shrunk obediently away to play on the floor. He’d horded all his hurt in his eyes. They had looked out at her from his forlorn face, dark, sad, and lonely. 

She had turned her head away, unable to bear it, promising tomorrow, tomorrow she would do better, next time…but knowing she would trip over this promise like all the others. She had closed her eyes and fallen into the arms of escape, slipping into the skin of a man who would never have failed as a father as she had as a mother.

Now she called Lómion’s head up from his play. “Come lay with me, my little prince. I will tell you a story.”

He came to her side at once, not scampering, for he did not run about like other children. He moved soft and silent as a shadow to the bed and climbed up. He snuggled into her arms, hording all his excitement in the vibration of his little body, and the luminous light in those dark eyes that looked at her like she’d given him the greatest treasure in the world simply by spending time with him.

“Will you tell me the story of Uncle Fingon’s first Games?” he asked in his soft voice that never rose in a child’s excited laughter or shouts of joy.

She combed her fingers through his black hair. He leaned into her touch, savoring every moment of tenderness in her arms. “I will tell a new story today, how does that sound?”

He smiled a pearly-teethed smile, his little nose so adorable Aredhel’s heart ached as she kissed its tip. She would take him away from here, her little prince, and when she passed him into her father’s arms that showered him in all the tender touches he could ever desire, she would not leave. She would stay. She couldn’t be the mother he needed, but she would stay and tell him stories and hold him in her arms like this when her mind did not bury her in deep, dark forests. She would never be enough, but her father would be. She just had to find the strength to spirit Lómion away and run home.


	35. Chapter 30

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 30

Lómion was being naughty. But Mother would not find out. She never had before. 

It wasn’t that he meant to be naughty. He tried to be good and play with his toys quiet as a mouse while Mother rested, but Mother slept for hours and hours and he grew bored and longed for supper time. On days Mother slept, Father would take him outside after supper and let him play in the woods. 

Most days he would play alone. Mother had told him that once they left the forest to live with Grandfather Fingolfin, he would meet lots of other children and never lack for friends to play with. But they hadn’t left yet, and Lómion was the only child among the Clan.

Some days though Father or Breglos would call him over to show him an animal marking or an interesting plant they wanted to teach him about. Those were his favorite times. If he was clever and quick of mind, he’d earn a smile or a touch. Never a hug, only his mother hugged him, but he leaned into Father’s hand on his shoulder or Breglos’ combing through his hair.

He had snuck out of Mother’s room today while she slept to come creeping into the forest, walking soft as a padding fox like Breglos had taught him. Mother would never know; he’d be back by supper time. 

His belly stopped squirming with guilt when he reached his favorite spot in the woods, a little stream with tinny white flowers poking their heads through the thick, green moss. It wasn’t _that_ far from the house. He was sure no wolves or bears would eat him, and if he did see something scary, he’d run back quick to the house.

He fell into his play, searching for interesting rocks and sticks, sending leaves floating down the belly of the stream, and watching how they piled on the backs of the rocks jutting up from the stream’s bed. He built dams, and carved out trenches in the soft mud to re-route a little trickle of the stream’s mighty flow. His hands and bare feet were coated in mud by the time he started shaping mud-huts and seeing how long he could keep them standing before the stream washed them away. 

The mud slipped slimy and cold through his toes and sleeved his fingers. It caked his leggings, even splattering in his tunic and hair. He was going to be in trouble if he left a trail of footprints behind him on his way to his room to change. He’d have to wash carefully to erase the evidence of his naughtiness. But he wasn’t ready to run home yet. It was still hours to supper time, and Mother wouldn’t miss him. She wouldn’t even notice he was gone. 

Sadness cramped his belly. He wished Mother did not need so much rest and could play with him and tell him wonderful stories in their secret language every day. But Mother was tired and sad. 

Lómion had overheard Hýril and Tenwë talking about it in the kitchen. He had crept in for a sweet. He was quite as a shadow; they hadn’t heard him at the door. They talked about Lómion’s mother, and how she’d gotten sick when Lómion entered her tummy. She hadn’t been like this before. Lómion was the reason she was always tired now. He’d made her sick. 

He snuck away and cried softly in his room, muffling the sounds in his covers. He whispered to his empty room his promise to always be a good boy. If he was very good, quiet, and obedient, maybe she wouldn’t be so tired anymore.

Lómion looked down at his muddy hands and clothes. He wasn’t being a good boy. He started crying, a quiet trickle of tears and nose sniffling. 

He had tried to be good, he really had! Next time he wouldn’t be naughty. He’d be a good boy and practice his letters and keep quiet as a mouse while Mother rested and regained her strength.

“What are you doing out here, boy?”

Lómion looked up at Father’s voice, fear gripping him. He was in so much trouble! Father stood tall and grim on the stream’s other bank, disapproval frowning his face. Now he’d hate Lómion for being naughty and never take him outside to play again! He’d never put his hand on Lómion’s shoulder and smile at him when he was a clever boy. He’d forget all about Lómion and not be Father anymore because Lómion was a bad boy.

Father sprang over the stream, crossing to Lómion’s side. Lómion shrank back. Father was scary. He had scary eyes, and when he wasn’t smiling at Lómion, Lómion wanted to hunch his shoulders up when he looked at him.

“What is this?” Father’s voice did not lash out like a smack on Lómion’s bottom. It folded soft as a bird’s closing wings. “Are you hurt, boy?” Father never called him by his name. He didn’t like the taste of their secret language, Mother said, he didn’t know it, because he wasn’t like Mother and him.

Lómion dropped his eyes and mumbled, “It’s nothing.”

Father stood over him a moment, towering like a mountain, then startled Lómion by dropping into a crouch in front of him. Lómion’s eyes jumped up to Father’s face. Father still looked unhappy, but his eyes didn’t press a weight of displeasure onto Lómion’s head. 

Father reached out, slowly, and took Lómion’s chin. He tilted Lómion’s face up. Then his other hand came up and wiped the tear tracks from Lómion’s cheeks. “It does not look like nothing.”

Lómion wanted to duck his face again and hide, but he also wanted to curl into that touch, curl up like a cat in the cup of Father’s palm, and have Father’s fingers stroke his head and run the length of his cat-spine. Cats always looked wondrously content when they were being petted. “I’m sorry I was naught and came out to play.”

“Hmm,” Father’s hand dropped from his chin. Lómion wilted like a flower. But perked up when Father’s hand did not withdraw from him in anger at his naughtiness, but sunk into his hair. 

Father’s thumb rubbed softly against his ear. Father had never shown him attention like this before. Lómion had hazy memories of being picked up and carried as a small child in Father’s arms, but Father had stopped holding him after he learned to walk. 

“It is dangerous to come out here alone. You are far too small to defend yourself. You might climb a tree and fall, breaking your neck, or be taken by a wild animal. Do not do it again. Now,” Father’s hand slipped from Lómion’s hair. Lómion’s heart dropped. “Clean yourself up, and I will take you back to the house.”

Lómion obeyed, quick and quiet. He washed his muddy feet and hands off in the stream before pulling on his soft moccasins. He looked down at his dirty clothes, and started splashing water over his leggings though he knew he could not wash all the mud out.

“Never mind that,” Father said, “come on.” 

Lómion looked over to see Father’s hand held out waiting for him. He scampered over to take it. Father always led him through the woods by the hand. It was one of Lómion’s favorite parts of coming outside.

Father led them back to the Clan’s settlement. Their house was the largest, though Mother said it was nothing to the homes their people, the Noldor, had lifted up to the skies in the North. The house stretched and rolled like a lazy cat rubbing its belly against the earth. Lómion thought it very fine. It was fun to climb to the top of the Wolfden and the high telians, but he did not think he’d want to live so far from the ground. He loved the earth, and wanted to feel it breathing under his feet.

Father told him to fetch some of his toys and bring them out to play in the Hearth Room. Lómion crept into Mother’s room where she still slept on the bed, and picked out of his favorite toys, his knights. He set them up for a battle on the hearth rug while Father sketched on one of the couches.

Lómion loved playing with his knights. One day he would meet the uncles and grandfather in Mother’s tales, and they would have grand adventures together. Lómion would be a mighty warrior of their people. He would have the brightest, sharpest sword, and kill many Orcs and Great Spiders. Everyone would cheer when he came home. They would write songs about his deeds and love Prince Lómion like they loved Prince Fingon, but he would be just like Prince Fingon and not get a fathead. He’d be kind and take care of everyone, especially Mother. Father would come live with them, and Breglos too. Lómion would go on adventures with them in the woods like he would fight great battles with his grandfather and uncles. 

“What have you there?” 

Lómion looked up from his play at Father’s voice. Shyly, but glowing with pride at being able to show his knights off, he introduced them to Father. But his voice drooped, trailing away into nothing when Father’s face pinched into a scowl.

Father dismissed him back to his play with a flick of his fingers. Lómion would not cry. It was not even that he wasn’t used to boring Father, it was that Father hadn’t liked his knights. His knights were the most wonderful toys he had ever had. But Father had not liked them at all.

The next day Mother had regained enough strength to rise from her bed. She sent Lómion to play in his room while she bathed, and then called him back to her. He found her combing her long, wet hair on the bed, a fresh white dress pulled on. Mother was the prettiest in the whole world. 

Her wrist twisted gracefully as she patted the spot beside her on the bed. He climbed up, and she settled him against her side. He snuggled into the arm she looped about him. He turned his nose into her and inhaled her wildflower scent, fresh from the bath.

She curled her fingers in his hair, “You are growing up so fast.” Her fingers slipped down to stoke his neck, and if he were a cat he would have purred. “Ah, my little prince, soon I will bring you home with me. But today I have a treat for you.” He looked up, waiting patiently for her to tell him more. “My good boy,” she leaned down and kissed his nose. He had pleased her.

She traced a swirling design on his cheek, and he smiled. “Today, you shall look upon Light for the first time.” She plunged her hand into the deep folds of her dress.

She pulled out something that burned with a white light unlike anything he’d ever seen. He had to shield his eyes with his hands, the burning becoming too much to bear despite a hunger roused in his chest. It felt as if something awakened from a long slumber inside him, but had always been there, always _wanting_ Light, but never knowing until it had been revealed.

The Light fit like a jewel in the middle of his mother’s palm. He didn’t know how he could have lived so long without knowing of this Light before. He felt like he would die if it were ever snuffed out.

“This is a Fëanorion Lamp,” Mother’s voice was reverent, her eyes transfixed on the Light. “It seems brighter than the stars in this dim forest, but its light is nothing compared to the Silmarils, the sun and moon, the Light of the Two Trees.” 

Mother cupped one of his hands in hers and guiding it to the Light, “Do not be afraid, my little prince, for though you were born in twilight, you were destined for the Light. Go on, touch it.” Lómion hesitated, fearing it would burn him as it had his eyes. His eyes still itched horribly from the brightness, but he squinted though it, determined not to let pain steal this beauty from him. “It is all right. It will not hurt you, and your eyes will grow accustomed to it in time.”

As his fingers reached out, his eyes swung up at the sound of Mother’s door opening. He flinched, heart jumping into his throat when Father’s voice cried out, pain in the sound. Lómion leapt up from the bed, rushing forward to where Father stumbled against the doorframe, hands shielding his eyes. 

Lómion had to help Father, quick! He spied Mother’s cloak thrown over the back of a nearby chair, and darted to it. He struggled under its heavy weigh, but pulled it free at last and ran back to Father’s side. 

“Here, Father!” he pressed the cloak against Father’s stomach, reaching as high as he could to help cover Father’s eyes from the Light. He knew it burned, but it must be a thousand times worse for Father’s strange eyes because Father would not act like this over a little sting. 

Father took the cloak from his hands and used it to cover his face. The tightness in Lómion’s chest eased. Father was safe now. Lómion had saved him, just like in one of his stories! Though he had never thought the villain defeated would be Light.

He looked back at Mother on the bed. And paused to wonder why she had not hidden the Light when she saw it hurt Father. But she tucked it away now with unhurried movements. 

Lómion watched it go, following its path until it disappeared inside her dress. Guilt stabbed him. Father had been hurt by the Light, and yet Lómion couldn’t help yearning for it back. He felt miserable for taking joy in something that had hurt Father.

His attention snapped back to Father when Father snarled. Father had lowered the cloak now the Light was gone, and fixed a furious gaze on Mother. “What was _that_?”

Mother’s shoulders pulled back, her neck long. “The peerless work of my people’s hands.”

“You will never flaunt your cursed Golodhrim magic tricks in my house or before my son again,” Father hissed, walking forward until he leaned over Mother where she sat in the pillow of the bed’s mattress. 

“I will show my son whatever I like. And by the laws of your own people, you can do nothing to stop me. A mother’s right to the education of her child is the equal to a father’s. Is that not so among the Avari?”

Father’s lip curled. “So, you would use the customs of my people as a weapon in one hand, while the other reaches out to snatch him away from them and press him into the arms of the Golodhrim.”

Mother’s head did not bow an inch. “I will use whatever I have to to ensure Lómion is taught in the ways of his people.”

“He is my son as well. And one of the Free People.”

Mother lifted a brow, “Your son? I had not realized you noticed.”

Father’s jaw clenched, but eyes slid away. They landed on Lómion who was trying to fold his shoulders and arms tight as bird wings against his sides and make himself small and quiet. Father’s eyes rested heavily upon him for a long moment. He gave no answer, and turned on his heel and strode from the room, slamming the door shut behind him.

Lómion’s hands came up to wrap around his waist, holding himself in tight. He kept silent and still and did not cry even if he wanted to.

“Lómion,” Mother’s soft voice called his head up. She beckoned to him with a smile. Her teeth were white as ice. Her arms opened to him, ready to draw him close and hold him. 

He climbed up on the bed with her, and her arms pulled him against her side. She kissed the crown of his head, and scratched his back lightly through the layer of his tunic as he lay atop her. “I love you, my little prince. Soon we will fly from this place, and you will drink of all the Light you desire. Your uncle Fingon will take you ridding, and your grandfather will tuck you into bed with kisses and hugs, and sing you lullabies like he did when I was a child. Oh how he will adore you, my little prince! They will love you so very much.”

Lómion buried his head in Mother’s neck, and drank in her every word, longing for the life she painted for him in her stories.

Some weeks later came a day Mother spent sleeping, regaining her strength, and Breglos took Lómion out into the woods to play because Father was busy with his work today. Father came into his room later after Breglos had given him a bath and tucked him into bed. Lómion startled when his bedroom door opened. He hid the picture he’d been drawing under the covers (he was supposed to have gone straight to bed), but could do nothing about the evidence of his naughtiness revealed in the lit candle, for Father had already seen the light.

Father did not comment on his naughtiness though as he crossed to Lómion’s bedside. Maybe Breglos hadn’t told him Lómion was supposed to be sleeping. It was a curious thing though that Father visited him in his room. Lómion could count on his fingers the times it had happened before.

Father hesitated by his bedside, and then sat down by Lómion’s covered knees. He had a box in his hands that he rested in his lap. His eyes ran over Lómion’s face, not saying anything, and if Lómion was not so very good at keeping quiet and still he would have squirmed. 

At last Father stirred, and he turned the box so its clasp faced Lómion. “I made this for you. It is a present.”

Lómion’s eyes widen. Father had never given him a gift before. His fingers curled into the bedspread to stop from reaching out until Father gave him permission. 

Father opened the clasp, and withdrew a figure from within. Lómion gasped. It was the same size as his knights, and was an Elf like them, but this Elf was not a toy Lómion had painted as best he could. Father had made the Elf out of wood like Lómion’s other knights, but the Elf’s features were sharp and clear, and Father had decorated the Elf with real gems. 

The Elf had blue moonstones for eyes, and little earrings of jade hung from his ears. He had real Elven hair, falling in a black cloud around his shoulders. He wore a long tunic with embroidery running over all its edges and down a strip at its very center from neck to ankle. He carried a spear in his hand that could be thrown unlike the other knights whose swords were carved into their hands.

Father held the Elf out to Lómion, and Lómion took it carefully, fingering the fineness of the tunic and Elven hair, and running a gentle finger down the length of the spear. “Thank you, Father.” He looked up Father shyly from under his lashes.

Father reached out and petted his hair. Lómion leaned into the touch. “This is not just any Quendë warrior. It is your great-grandfather Finwë.”

Lómion’s eyes dropped back to the Elf’s face, then lifted back to Father’s. “I don’t know many stories about him.” Finwë had never done anything exciting in Mother’s tales. But he did look like a great warrior with his sharp spear, even though he wasn’t dressed like the other knights in armor and proud helms.

Father’s hand fell from his hair. He gently plucked Finwë out of Lómion’s hands, and stood him on the hill of Lómion’s knee. “He was strong and tall, almost the tallest of all the Quendi when they still walked under the starlight. And though dark things hunted the Quendi, he did not cower and hide. It is told that he battled the Dark Hunter alone and fearless. He did not run, even from the eye of evil itself, but stood and faced it. You should be proud his blood flows in your veins.”

Lómion curled his hand around Finwë’s thick tail of hair, stroking it softly. “I am, Father.”

“Good.” Father picked up Finwë and stood him on the bedside table. “You may take him on adventures tomorrow. Now it is late.”

Father set the box aside, and Lómion obediently tucked himself under the covers. Father smoothed them down around him. Lómion’s heart arched up in yearning. It was the closest Father had ever come to tucking him in like his grandfather did in Mother’s stories.

Father looked down into his uptitled face. He stared at Lómion as if mapping all the corners of his face, calculating all the angles, considering Lómion like a piece of metal before a forging. But Lómion didn’t feel like a _thing_ under the look. He felt like he was something special to Father in that moment, something he had to pause to consider fully, something to memorize and understand.

A powerful need to know what Father was thinking surged up to tighten a fist around his throat. He _needed_ to know if Father loved him maybe just a little.

Without conscious design, driven by pure instinct, he felt something _give_ as he looked into Father’s eyes, like compressing a sponge and releasing water. It wasn’t a tear, though he felt –knew it in some place where it was written in his bones—that he could tear if he wished. But he didn’t want to hurt Father, so he just pushed a little, pushed into some place behind Father’s eyes, a place where memories were stored and made. 

He tumbled into eyes like moonstones, the way that mouth wore a smile, and then: the flash of a knife slicing down, slicing _open_. Eyes leaning over him, black holes sucking him into a groaning pit of malice, a mouth smiling sharp as the blade digging itself under his skin. _Terror_.

Lómion tumbled out of that place in Father’s eyes and back into his own, body trembling, that terror coating the back of his throat. His hands came up to press against the place the knife had cut open his chest. He could still feel the cold bit of steel and a pain beyond anything he’d ever imagined.

Father’s hand lifted to his temple, face a grimace. “What?” he asked, eyes fixing on Lómion’s. “What was that?”

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to! It just happened!” His body shook, fingers worming against his chest. He was scared, but the pain was already dulling. But those eyes…those black eyes like holes…They were gonna get him and eat him up!

“Shh,” Father took his trembling hands in his calloused ones. They closed large around Lómion’s, swallowing them like a clam closing its mouth over a pearl. “It is all right. I am not angry. Just tell me what happened. I have not felt something like that for…a long time.”

“I…I wanted to know what you were thinking, and then…and then I went behind your eyes and I saw...”

Father’s hands tightened around his. “What did you see?” Father’s voice sounded rough, urgent.

“I…there were eyes. They were gonna eat me! And there was a knife—” A great heaving sob tore out of his chest. “I’m scared, Father!”

Father snatched him out of the bedcovers, and put him into his lap, wrapping his arms around him. Shock held Lómion perfectly still for one frozen moment. Father’s arms were strong, and his hand large as it stroked through his hair. Lómion was not afraid anymore. Father would keep him safe. Lómion flung his arms around Father’s neck, and squeezed tight. 

“You are safe now,” Father said, so gently, his Breglos-voice. Father wouldn’t let those eyes eat Lómion. Father would protect him.

Father held him until he stopped trembling, and then kept holding him, cheek pressed against the fall of Lómion’s hair, hands smoothing down Lómion’s back. He sang softly in a language Lómion did not know, but soothed him. Lómion’s eyes drooped. He fell asleep in Father’s arms. 

He awoke to murmuring voices and a hand stroking his hair. His body curled around a large, warm one, naked skin pressed to naked skin. He had put on his nightshirt before bedtime as he always did, where was it? And where was he? The voice was deep, a man’s, not Mother’s.

His eyes focused on a chest he’d curled up against. He stared. It was littered in scars, some small and silvery, others deep as gorges. He looked up. Father’s face looked back down at him. Then he remembered what happened last night. The knife, the evil eyes that wanted to gobble him up. He shivered, and pressed closer to Father.

“Shh,” Father brushed the hair back from his face. “You are safe.”

Lómion nodded, body relaxing against Father’s. He laid his head down on Father’s shoulder. He remembered now. Father would protect him.

Another set of fingers brushed against the hollow of his nape. He looked over his shoulder and saw Breglos in bed with them. Breglos smiled down at him, and lent forward to kiss his cheek. 

Then Breglos sat up. He wasn’t wearing a nightshirt either, but had leggings on like Father. Breglos dressed. He touched Father’s shoulder, and Father turned his face up for Breglos to brush a kiss into his mouth before parting. 

Father eased Lómion from his arms and sat up. He reached for his own tunic and shrugged it on. Then his gaze fell back on Lómion, and he dropped to sit cross-legged in the bed beside him. He caressed Lómion’s cheek, and Lómion tilted into the touch. 

Giddy knots jumped in his belly. Father had held him in his lap, taken him to his bed and let Lómion sleep there all night! Never had Lómion thought he’d be allowed in Father’s bed. He’d only ever caught glimpses into Father’s room before, never daring to enter without permission. It was like a dream come true, and he wanted to hug himself in happiness. 

Father asked, voice soft as his caress on Lómion’s cheek, “Have you ever looked behind a Quendë’s eyes before?” 

Lómion’s gaze dropped. He didn’t want to think about doing that scary thing ever again. “No,” he whispered. “But I promise never to again!”

Father’s fingers paused, then slid down to consume the whole of Lómion’s shoulder in their cup. “I know it frightened you, and I do not want you to ever look behind my eyes again, for frightening things have happened to me. But this is a part of who you are. Could you use this power of yours for evil? Undoubtedly. But you could also use it for good. Looking into the hearts and minds of others could save a life, prevent a traitor from worming into your nest. It is how you use this power that shall be judged. But,” Father’s hand slid off his shoulder and picked up a lock of Lómion’s hair to curl, “those are thoughts to return to when you are older. I do not wish you to grow afraid of your gift, but you are too young yet to train it.”

Lómion would try to do as Father said and not be frightened. He had to be brave. He was going to be a hero one day like his uncle Fingon. 

Father touched his cheek, “Maeglin I name you.” Lómion’s breath sucked in. Father was giving him a father-name at last!

Father’s finger traced over Lómion’s face, down his nose, soft jaw, pointed ears, the shape of his eyes. “I will mark you now.” He picked up an open box of tools from the bedside table. “When a Starchild earns his father-name, his father will mark it into his skin so that the Starchild will have the core of their being anchoring them always. There was a time of Darkness our people passed through, Maeglin, and the Quendi feared that they would lose themselves within it. But you will carry the mark of who you are on your body always, so that you will never become lost in the Darkness.”

Lómion listened with wide, attentive eyes, just as he listened to Mother’s stories.

Father picked Lómion up, and settled him atop the covers, naked. “Lie down on your stomach, Maeglin. I will ink your name into your spine.” Lómion lay down. Father’s large hand settled on the back of Lómion’s neck, then smoothed slowly down the length of his spine. “There will be some pain, but I will rub a healing ointment onto it after and the pain will end.”

Lómion bit his lip, but swore to be strong and not cry no matter how much it hurt. He had tensed up in anticipation of the pain, and Father’s fingers kneaded into his back, “It will not be too painful.”

Father started singing in that strange, star-like language, and Lómion relaxed into it. He closed his eyes and did not watch as Father set up his tools. He felt a nub of cold metal touch the small of his back, and held his breath. Father did not stop singing, and, though it did hurt, it was nothing like the knife. Tears did not threaten Lómion’s eyes.

When Father was done, he rubbed the healing ointment into Lómion’s back. The lingering pain smoothed away under the circles Father’s fingers made over his skin. Then Father helped him up and led him over to the looking-glass. He had to use a small hand-held mirror to examine his new marking in the bigger glass.

His fingers curled around his back to explore the faint shimmer edging the markings. “Is it magick?”

Father’s hand touched the marks higher up where they climbed to Lómion’s nape, “Not the Land’s magick, no. It was the Power of Song. Now the mark will never fade, and will grow with you as your body grows.”

Maeglin could not read the markings. They were not Tengwar. “What are these runes?”

“Cirth runes. Similar to the ones now used in Doriath, for they are the root from which those sprung. These are the oldest form of the Quendi’s written language.”

“Does it just say my name? It takes a lot of Cirth runes to just say one name.”

He saw Father’s mouth twitch into a smile through the looking-glass. “It says,” Father’s fingers touched down at the base of his spine. He traced up as he read them aloud for Lómion, “Maeglin Starchild, son of Eöl Starborn.”

Father sent him back to his room to dress for the day, telling him to meet him in the dining hall for breakfast. He was spending the special day of his naming with Father! 

Lómion vibrated with excitement, and hurried to his room on soft feet whispering like leaves against the forest floor. He pulled on his clothes, but before meeting Father for breakfast, detoured to Mother’s room. Father had named him at last, and not only that, but marked him as his son with a beautiful, magick mark in the language of the first Elves!

He found Mother resting, but crept up to her bedside and eased onto the bed beside her. “Mother?” he touched her shoulder. She stirred under the covers. “Mother, can I show you something? It will only take a moment. I am sorry to disturb your resting.”

She blinked her eyes open. It took them a moment to focus on his face as it always did. “Lómion?”

“Yes, Mother, I…” His cheeks heated with the excitement flushing through him. “Father gave me my name today. And he gave me a mark with it too.” He smiled. “Do you want to see?”

She sat up, brushing back the tangle of her hair. “A mark?”

“Yes, Mother.” He twisted around, and wiggled out of his tunic. “See?”

Mother said nothing. He craned his neck around to look. He shrunk back from the storm blown into Mother’s eyes, grinding inside her jaw and the white press of her lips. 

Mother said, voice so tight Lómion thought it was a coil a hairsbreadth from snapping in his face and cutting his cheek with the force of its constrained rage, “Stay here.”

Lómion curled his knees into his chest as Mother strode from the room on a thundercloud. He thought she would be happy. But he’d made her so _angry_. He’d never seen her angry like this before.

He flinched as her voice rang down the hall, calling for Father. He ducked his head, pressing his cheek into his knee when the shouting started. The voices rose higher and higher and he tucked smaller and smaller. They made him feel like he should apologize for existing and being the cause of their quarrel. 

His eyes fell on his knights lined up on the lid of his toy chest. Finwë was still on his bedside table, but Fingon was there. Fingon would not be curling into a ball, scared of angry voices that made him feel like he was a carcass two lions fought over. He would be brave, stand up, and go tell them he was sorry, that he hadn’t meant to be a bad boy.

He uncurled his legs, and dropped his toes over the side of the bed, touching down on the floor. He followed the angry voices to the dining hall, and peaked in through the open, thick-beamed doorway. Mother and Father faced-off like wolves snarling at each other.

Father flung out, “He will learn the Star Tongue, and the ways of the Free People, and when he reaches his thirteen year he will undertake his First Great Task!”

Mother shouted back like a clap of thunder, “He is _never_ going to be a _Moriquende_!” 

Father stuck, viper-fast, and struck Mother across the cheek, snapping her head back. Mother threw herself on him, clawing at his eyes and tearing at his hair. They hit the floor heavily, rolling, wrestling, snapping and hissing like beasts. Father came out on top of Mother, and pinned her hands over her head, face blazing and twisted into something terrifying.

Mother bucked her hips up into him, freeing a leg to wrap around his waist. She surged up and bit him on the mouth, drawing blood. He growled, and bit her back.

Mother hissed like a spitting cat, “Your cock. _Now_.”

Father released one of her wrists and yanked up her skirts. Mother’s free hand went between their bodies, doing something down there. Lómion held onto the thick beam of the doorframe, eyes huge, too scared to walk the rest of the way into the room. He was _sorry_. Sorry he’d made them so angry and mean and scary. He hadn’t meant to. He would be a better boy, and never do anything naughty again!

Mother’s legs were naked and wrapped around Father, and Father’s hips were hitting hers. Lómion didn’t understand why. They were fighting, but not. They were still snarling and biting each other, but Mother’s free hand fisted in Father’s hair wasn’t yanking his head back, or freeing itself to hit Father in the face. There were strange sounds too, and Father started grunting. 

When Mother shouted, Lómion knew he had to help her. Somehow Father was hurting her. He crept only a few sliding footsteps closer. He wanted to run away. He forced himself to keep going. He had to be brave like his uncle Fingon.

Mother’s eyes flickered to him. They widened. “Go back to your room, Lómion!”

Father’s head snapped around to stare at him. Father’s eyes went huge, and looked like he was staring into a nightmare. Horror punched itself into his face. He tumbled off Mother with a cry. His hands lifted to Lómion, then shrank away, shoulders folding up like crumbled pieces of parchment. His hands flew down to his loose leggings and scrambled to yank his tunic over his exposed body.

“Lómion, go to your room,” Mother said, brushing her skirts back down over her legs. She looked calm, her storm clouds driven away. 

Lómion’s eyes swung back to Father who’d curled himself up on the floor and whimpered like a kicked dog. “Father?”

“Too young. Too young. He is too young to see,” Father whispered to himself, a sound like something tearing in his voice.

Mother sat up, looking at Father with a frown. “Yes, well. That cannot be helped now. And he probably will not remember when he is older anyway.”

Father keened, a wounded sound, rocking his fisted body.

“Father?” Lómion stepped closer. He wanted to go hide in his room. He wanted Father back, the one who put his arms around him and made him feel safe.

Mother said, “Stop this. You are frightening Lómion. It was an accident. A mistake. There is no need—”

Father surged up, eyes wild, panic eating their edges white. Lómion scrambled back, away from the fey creature with the eyes of a wolf. “A mistake!” Father’s voice was as wild as his eyes, “Children can _die_ from mistakes!” His wild eyes swung to Lómion, raking over him like he thought Lómion would die right now. “Look, look!” he pointed a shaking finger at Lómion, “Too young. Too young.” Father’s hands clawed into his hair, scratching and tearing at himself, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, a mistake, I’m _sorry_. I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean to hurt you. Sorry, so sorry.” 

Father cried out like that knife was cutting into him again. He shot to his feet. He had the face of a crazed stranger, a rabid dog. He ran passed Lómion as if he couldn’t see him at all, couldn’t see anything, and fled out the door. The sound of the house’s great double doors banging open echoed off the stones.

Mother’s arms slipped around Lómion from behind, and he spun to bury his face in her shoulder. “I have you. Shh, I am here.” She closed her arms about him, holding him close. 

She stood and picked him up with her. Lómion kept his face hidden inside the comfort of her arms. She carried them back to her room, and settled him on the bed. She started telling him a story, and stroked his back until it stopped trembling and lay quiet and listened to the flow of her words.

Mother didn’t say anything more about his naming mark until the next time she gave him a bath. He saw the way her mouth pinched tight when her eyes fell on it. 

She muttered to herself as she prepared the bathwater. He strained his ears and caught the trailing end, “…what will Father say when he sees that dreadful thing?”

Lómion’s heart ran cold. Would his grandfather not want him anymore? Did having the mark mean his grandfather would never love him? 

It was so ugly Mother couldn’t even look at it. But he’d thought it was beautiful. He hated it. He treasured it. He wished Father had never marked him. He hoarded the memory of the marking against his heart. 

It was like when he went into the forest with Father or lied with Mother in her bed. They were two different worlds, and they didn’t match up. He felt like he was tearing in two, right down his spine where the mark walked its declaration up his body: 

He was Maeglin Starchild, son of Eöl Starborn.

He was Lómion Finwëion, son of Aredhel Ar-Feiniel.

The mark was a remembrance of Father’s love etched into his skin, and a hideous disfigurement on the body of a Noldo Prince.


	36. Chapter 31

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 31

A hand on his shoulder shook him awake. “Lómion. Lómion get up.”

Maeglin’s eyes focused on his mother’s face. He frowned, sitting up in bed. The room was dark with night, only the halo of his mother’s candle illuminated it. 

“What is it, Mother?” Alarm gripped him and he threw off the bedcovers, toes sinking into the fur spread over the stones. “Has something happened?”

“Dress yourself. Be quick about it, but silent.” His mother set the candle down and threw an empty sack on his bed. She turned to him where he stood unmoving. “Quickly now, Lómion!” 

She spun away, went to his clothes chest, and started pulling pieces out. She threw a tunic and leggings at him. He caught them mechanically, not taking his eyes off her. She flew about the room, electric as a thunderstorm. 

“Mother,” he started carefully, “Something is…different.” Different about her. 

She didn’t even cast him a glance, not slowing down as she stuffed handfuls of the Noldorin-style clothing she’d sewn for him into the sack, by-passing the one’s made by the Wolf Clan. “Never mind that. We need to leave quickly, before Eöl and his guard dogs wake.” She looked up and scowled to find him still in his nightshirt. “I said get dressed, Lómion. We do not have much time.”

Maeglin swallowed and pressed the bundle of clothes against his chest. “Where are we going?” His mother rarely left the house. Where did she want to take him that must be a secret from Father? And besides, “Today is Father’s day, Mother. I cannot come with you, Father is teaching me in the forge today.”

His mother made a tisk of displeasure. It was the only thing about her since she’d woken him that he recognized. Mother _loathed_ the arrangement for his education as much as Father resented it back. They’d split him in two like slicing up a ham, and passed him between them every other day. 

Mother had argued that she should get him on all her Good Days (the days she was not too tired to get out of bed), and Father could have him on the Bad Days. But Mother had more days she at least roused enough in bed to tell him stories or look over his studies then when Maeglin had been young, so the split would not have been even. Father said it wasn’t his problem if Mother couldn’t get herself out of bed. She wanted to do this the way of the Free People? Well then they would. They would split Maeglin’s education right down the middle.

On the days Mother had no energy for Maeglin, she would still lock him in the room with her so Father could not snatch him away. He would work on his studies or play quietly while she rested, and cast longing glances out the window. Sometimes, when he couldn’t stand to be shut up another moment, he’d sneak out. But he was careful never to sneak to Father’s side, that would have pressed a boulder-sized load of guilt against his neck since it would be betraying Mother twice over.

His mother said now, “None of that matters anymore. We are leaving.”

“But Father will be mad when we return, and then—”

His mother spun to face him, a huge smile on her face. It spread too wide. That wasn’t his mother’s smile. It was stranger’s. “We are never retuning here. The day has come at last, my little prince. I am taking you home to my family.” She walked to him and took his face in the cups of her hands. She looked down at him, and he saw his mother’s love looking back even if she was acting all wrong, and she was talking about _leaving_.

“But, Mother,” he whispered. “I…I don’t think…” He bit his lips. Hadn’t his mother spoken of this moment all his life? He yearned to meet the family of her stories, and see the fair places and mighty strongholds. She held out her hand and in its palm rested the pearl of Prince Lómion, a great warrior and hero of their people, and all the love she’d promised him was waiting for him in his family’s arms. His heart curved up, pressing against his ribcage, longing.

And yet…

She said they would never come back. And he wasn’t child enough anymore to think that his father or Breglos would be coming with them.

He would never see them again. There would be no more days perched on his father’s worktable to give him a good view but keep him safe as his father talked his way through the steps he took in the forging of a blade, or how to cut a gem just so, or draw silver out into a thread glimmering like starlight. There would be no more afternoons spent traipsing through the woods at Breglos’ side as Breglos taught him all the secrets of the forest and how to hold a bow. There would be no more evenings spread out on his belly on the hearth rug with his fingers sunk into Thinfin or Morfin’s thick coats as he practiced the Star Tongue with his father and let the words flow out of his chest like bird-song. There would be no more looks of pride, hands on his shoulder, fingers carding through his hair, body curled up against his father’s side with his father’s arm around his waist in that possessive way he loved because it meant he was his father’s son and his father was proud to call him such. There would be no more Maeglin Starchild. There would only be Prince Lómion.

He longed for his mother’s stories’ fulfillment and the family he only knew through her stories but loved, yet his heart broke in his chest to think of never seeing his father or Breglos again. 

His mother urged him to dress and tightened the neck of the sack. “That should see you outfitted until we reach Hithlum. Now I already have the rest of our supplies in the saddlebags. Once you are—”

“What about the rest of my things?” His eyes roved over his room, helplessness pressing itself up against his chest, a feeling of being torn from childhood. What about his knights? He couldn’t leave his knights. Or the other toys his father had crafted for him. Or the hunting knife Breglos had gifted him. Or the earrings his father had made, and the bracelets and hair adornments his father had showed him with since he’d become Maeglin Starchild. 

“Leave them. You will have much finer things once we are back among the Noldor,” his mother said carelessly, like they were all worthless as pebbles dropped in a river. She shot him an impatient look, “Hurry _up_ , Lómion.”

Slowly, sluggishly, he pulled off his nightshirt and dressed. He didn’t know what to do. He had been split down the middle. His heart belonged in two places, and to choose one meant leaving the rest of it behind, buried in his father’s palms.

His mother snatched up his hand and pulled him out the door. He followed like a dream-walker. None of this was real. It couldn’t be real. They couldn’t really be leaving. He hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye. What would his father think when he woke to find Maeglin had left him like this, like a thief in the night, like his father’s love had meant so little he’d left it discarded in a pile of pebbles on the floor.

His mother’s tall, white horse waited for them among the trees crowded up to the house. His father did not like the light. His mother tied his sack of clothing to the saddle and reached for him. He stepped back, her fingers finding air. 

She snatched his wrist, tugged him forward. “Stop wasting time!”

“Mother, wait, I…” 

She did not wait. She swung him up into the saddle. He had to grasp hold of the horn. The horse shifted under him, a massive beast of power between his legs. He had never ridden before. He wasn’t scared, but it was alarming.

His mother swung up behind him and looped her arm around his waist, pulling him back against her. “Mother, I don’t think—can we just—I don’t know if I want to go.”

Her arm tightened around him. “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you want to come with me. There is nothing for you here.” She sent the horse leaping forward at a word.

Maeglin squirmed, trying to look around her body back and catch a glimpse of the house. He realized, like the piecing brightness of morning, that he wanted to see Father running down the steps, calling his name, coming to take him back home.

“I want to go back! I want to go home!” He twisted in her arms, but she held him fast.

“Stop this, Lómion. We are going home. Forget this place. _Forget it_.”

Maeglin couldn’t forget! He pleaded to go back, but she shut her ears against him. His heart was shattering in his chest. He fell into great, gasping sobs. He cried and cried as the forest flew by them. He would never see his father again. 

He cried until he fell into an exhausted sleep, lulled by the rhythm of the horse’s body moving under him.

He startled awake when the horse’s rhythm jarred, his body surging forward, only an arm about his waist keeping him from flying over the horse’s head. His eyes flew over the Elves emerging from the trees like wolves from the shadows. He found his father’s face, and his heart leapt with joy, “Father!” 

His father’s face had been drawn tight, mouth grim, eyes hardened chips of onyx. But the moment Maeglin called for him with wild happiness ringing in his voice, the tight lines eased, and the stiffness in his body flowed out as if with a huge sigh of relief.

Maeglin struggled in the arms restraining him, trying to jump down and fly into his father’s. But she held him caged against her. “Be still, Lómion,” she ordered. But she wasn’t even his mother, so he didn’t listen to the command like a good, obedient boy. She was a stranger crawled into his mother’s skin. His mother would never have _forced_ him to come. She would have listened when Maeglin said he wanted to stay, and she would have stayed too, and everything could have gone back to the way it had been before this stranger crept into his bedroom to steal him away.

“Release my son,” his father’s voice whipped out.

“I am taking _my_ son with me. And we are leaving this cursed place!” 

“It is over. You will never slip passed us with my son a prisoner in your arms.” His father gestured to the fierce-eyed Clan forming a ring of warriors around them armed to the teeth. “Let him go.”

“So you will keep us prisoners here? Locked in this cage like Orc captives? _Monster_.”

His father flinched back. But Breglos was there, putting a hand on his shoulder and hissing at not-Mother. His father drew strength from Breglos, gathered himself, and said, voice a blade of ice, “You may fly wherever you like. But you will not steal my son from me. He belongs here.”

“He belongs with his people!”

“He is already with his people!”

They pulled back like wrestles circling for the next attack, eyeing for weaknesses. Not-Mother struck first, “You must have learned a few tricks as a thrall. You have developed a talent for imprisonment.”

Breglos snarled. “Speak to him like that again, and I will—”

His father’s hand clamped over Breglos’ shoulder, “Not in front of Maeglin.” 

Breglos’ jaw tightened. His eyes flickered down from their murderous rage at not-Mother to land on Maeglin. They were soft with apology. Maeglin swallowed and nodded, but he was glad his father had made Breglos stop. 

Not-Mother spat, “Still playing the guard hound, I see. Or is it his bed-warmer? I never did learn which one of you bends over. I would bet on you, but then Eöl can be disgustingly pathetic and clingy, can’t he? A real broken mess.”

An arrow whizzed by not-Mother’s ear. Maeglin cried out. 

“Hold!” his father shouted, hand slicing through the air, eyes punching into the shadows, seeking out the culprit among his people. Father’s eyes turned back to not-Mother. They were so cold Maeglin shivered. “You will lower my son to the ground now, and either get out of my forest, or turn around and go back to the house and never attempt to steal my son again. If you do not do as I say, I will kill your horse first. And then I will simply take what is mine.”

Not-Mother sucked in a breath through her teeth, fingers knotting in her horse’s white mane. “You would not dare. Her fall might harm Lómion.”

“Oh, he will not be harmed,” his father promised in a menacing voice. “The forest floor belongs to me.”

Not-Mother said nothing for a long moment. Then her arm shifted around Maeglin and she lowered him. He stood on shaky legs and looked back up at her where she sat high on her horse. She did not look at him. Her eyes were busy trying to battle Father’s, but Father was looking at Maeglin. 

Maeglin turned away and ran towards Father. Whoever that was on the horse, it wasn’t his mother. His father scooped him up in his arms and kissed both his cheeks, whispering in a hoarse voice, “My son. My son.”

Maeglin put his head on his father’s shoulder and whispered back because he didn’t want his father to think he’d tried to leave him without even saying goodbye, “I didn’t want to leave, Father, I promise. But Mothe—whoever that is, wouldn’t let me go.”

His father’s arms tightened around him. “I have you back now. You do not need to be afraid of her taking you from me again. I will _never_ let you go.” 

Maeglin snuggled deeper into his father’s arms, seeking the comfort of their protection. It was over now. He was home. But he did worry over his mother. “Something bad has happened to Mother. That person over there isn’t her.”

His father stroked his hair. “I am sorry, Maeglin. We will talk about it when we get home. Hush now.” Maeglin’s arms tightened around his father’s neck. What if something terrible had happened to Mother?

His father was speaking again, “Go now. Let us see the back of you. And do not come crawling into my forest again.”

The voice of Not-Mother flashed back like a sun-flare, “Oh, I am going. But if you think this is over then you are a greater fool than I thought. You forget who I am!” 

Maeglin heard the sound of horse hooves, and then his father’s voice ringing loud with command in his ear, shouting in the Star Tongue the word for binding. A horse screamed. Not-Mother cried out. Maeglin buried his head in his father’s shoulder.

His father voice, dangerous as the darkness between stars: “And you forget who _I_ am. You played your hand too soon, and my love for my son softened my heart to give you mercy for his sake. But perhaps I did forget who you are. Though you have surprised me today. I did not take you for a child-stealer. But you have lost your chance now. You will not be leaving my forest. Here you will remain, a prisoner, yes, you could call yourself that.”

Not-Mother answered, “So you have proved yourself a breed of Orc indeed. You will regret this. I promise you that. You will not be able to keep me here against my will. I will escape. And make you pay.”

His father’s hands stroked down Maeglin’s spine, feeling the fine tremors shivering through his body. He spoke not a word to not-Mother, but said, “Take her back to the house. And see to the horse. It will calm in a moment. It was only shadows that spooked it.”

His father turned and retreated to where his own black horse had been left foraging for itself. He lifted Maeglin up onto the soft padding laid over the horse’s back, and leapt up behind him. Maeglin sunk back into his father’s arms, and his father turned them towards home.

*

His mother was forever contemplating her next exit. She never lived in a single moment. She was always somewhere off in the future. Even in those moments she remembered his existence, she would spend half their conversation pacing around the room –to the door she wanted to disappear through.

He labored over his heart until he could uproot the bitterness that was brittle enough to break bones. His mother was sick. She was sick inside her head. 

But he missed his mother, his real mother. He wanted her to come home and fill this shell wearing her face, laughing too loudly, stumbling back into the house a dizzy mess reeking of alcohol, running away from him, only sometimes not running away but staying. _Years_ spent listening to his parents tear bloody pieces out of each other like beasts fighting over a kill, fighting over _him_ , until he felt pre-maturely old, stretched, as if his spirit were too-old for his body, pulled in two opposite directions that would tear him as far as the East was from the West before they ever met.

Maeglin’s body was a battlefield, his heart the prize. 

His mother remembered she had a son today. Out of the corner of her eye she caught him walking into the house, returned from a day spent at the forge with his father. She called him over to her in a loud, boisterous voice that had only remembered he existed because he’d walked by.

He went to her, as he always did when she called, because this was all the mother he had left, and when she remembered he existed she called him her little prince, and touched his cheek with love. It was like his mother was still in there, struggling inside that shell to get back to him.

“Maeglin,” his mother held up a hand for him, and he took it at once, letting her drawn him down into the couch of furs beside her. She smiled at him, her beautiful ice-white smile, and caressed his face. “What has my little prince been up to today?”

“I was working at the forge.”

She curled a lock of his hair about her finger, “Oh? And what have your clever hands been up to?”

His mouth lifted in the shadow of a smile. He pulled out the knife he’d finished the last sharpening of that afternoon. The steel was polished and gleamed in the light of the lamps. The yellow light curled shadows in the Cirth runes etched into the knife’s spine.

His mother let out a sound of appreciation, and lifted the knife from his hands to examine it. “It is marvelous work, as your work ever is.” She passed it back to him. “You have a great gift, my little prince.” Then she sighed and gave him a disappointment look. Not disappointed in him, but in the circumstances she believed him reduced to. 

She thought his gift was squandered here when he could be apprenticed to one of his Fëanorion cousins and learning skills beyond his wildness dreams. _Oh, Lómion, what wonders the Fëanorions birthed with their hands! I cannot even put them into words, for those creations shone brighter than any diamond. Oh, Lómion, if you could only behold the wonders with your own eyes, you would see how much of your birthright is withheld from you while we languish here, prisoners._

His mother took both his hands in hers. “You are so gifted, Lómion. You have the talent to rise to heights not seen since Fëanor. You could be the greatest smith amongst our people. Oh, how I wish I could take you to Curufin and Celebrimbor, your cousins. They were just like you at your age, forever off in a forge, dreaming of the wonders they would create. Ah, the things I have seen Curufin do in a forge!” 

Her hand rose to touch the earrings dangled from his ears, fingering a sphere of black opal on his necklace, then drop down to trace the red jasper of his bracelet. “If you could see the beauty birthed from the Fëanorions’ hands, you would understand why I tell you that what you have now, all of this,” she turned her hand out to the Hearth Room around them, the grandest room in the house, “is a woodsman’s hut set next to the palaces of the Noldor. And these trinkets you wear with such pride would be judged the work of a novice.”

She did not think her words gave insult to him, because the jewelry he wore was not forged by his hands but his father’s. He said nothing in his father’s defense. It would have done no more good than trying to defend the Noldor to his father’s ears.

She took his hands, bringing his eyes up to hers. Softness curved in their edges. His real mother was still in there, trying to fight her way back to him. “You would like Curufin and Celebrimbor. Their hearts beat the same rhythm as your own. Think of what it would be like to work side-by-side with them in a forge, birthing marvels together, and forging friendships alongside.”

She knew she fed him sweet temptation. How often she reminded him that the Fëanorions’ lands were only a few days ride away, close enough to reach out and grasp. Wouldn’t he like to visit them? Yes. And no. 

He was afraid to leave the forest. He never forgot the terror and heartbreak of their flight, of her stealing him. He had not ventured so close to the eaves of the forest since, as if terrified if he wandered too close he would tumble out and never find his way back in. 

He dreamed, not often, but enough for the dreams to imprint themselves in his mind with terror. He dreamed he left Nan Elmoth, and though he ran and ran through fields of light so bright it stung his eyes, he could never find his way back home again. 

He answered her, “Maybe one day we will visit them.” Maybe. It was not as if his heart did not long for the faces and lands her stories spun. It was only that he was terrified of loosing what he already had in the attempt to reach out for more.

His mother let the temptation slip to the back burner where it simmered away, as constant a longing as the one he harbored for his grandfather and uncles. His mother launched into a retelling of a memorial hunt she’d had with Celegorm. His mother spoke often of Celegorm, longing for the excitement of hunts with him in years long gone. His mother, this shell of her, sought out excitement like an otter water. It was her element.

His father found them sitting together not long after. His mouth soured as his eyes fell on her. He turned away from her to Maeglin, calling him away to supper. He scowled when she stood and announced she would share the meal with them. She looped her arm with Maeglin’s and steered them out the door, walking in that summer-storm way of hers, all eclectic charge and the rolling footsteps of a huntress.

His father laid the table out for only the three of them. Hunting had taken Breglos away from the house for a few days, and the other Elves living under the stone house’s roof no longer ate at table with Aredhel. She was shunned. 

Maeglin’s heart clenched to think of his mother’s isolated existence. She must be lonely even if she never spoke of it. She spent her days in the forest hunting or ridding as far out as she could struggle before the forest caged her in. She must be terribly unhappy under her undefeatable veneer.

They served themselves in tense silence. Or at least Eöl was tense, Maeglin was anxious, and his mother projected a relaxed façade with a restless sea shifting in the air about her: the way her eyes darted to the door, the way she couldn’t sit still in the chair, the way she drummed her fingers on the table top, and whipped her hair back with a flash of her white hand.

But his mother couldn’t eat a meal with them in silence. Even this knotted silence would have been better than the venom his mother and father descended to whenever they spoke to each other. Their words slid daggers into Maeglin’s heart from both sides. Neither meant to hurt him, but they both did. 

She chose her words like weapons, knowing exactly how much his father hated talk of Noldor. She picked back up the thread of their conversation from before. “Your cousin Celegorm is the greatest huntsman of the Elves. Oromë himself was his mentor and taught him the secrets of the forest and the languages of beasts. There is not a beast he cannot tame, or a forest he could not master,” she shot a pointed glare at Eöl. “Ah, the thrill of a hunt when he was my competitor! He was the worthiest opponent; none could equal him in—”

“Enough,” his father’s voice was a cold knot of ice. He did not abide talk of the Noldor in his presence. Not even by Maeglin. This part of Maeglin was reserved only for his mother’s ears. His father did not want to know Lómion, or want him to exist. He only wanted Maeglin Starchild. “I will not hear about those Land-stealers at my table.”

His mother snorted, tossing her head, leaning back in her chair in feigned negligence. “Land-stealers? If it were not for the Noldor, all of Beleriand would be enthralled to Morgoth. Or in your case: re-enthralled.” His father’s jaw clenched. Maeglin’s hands curled into balls under the table. His shoulders hunched in preparation for the storm. His mother sneered out in an attack calculated to draw blood: “Maybe you hate my people so much because they stand and fight while yours crawl. Maybe you are missing your old master. Maybe you liked your place groveling at his feet. Or was it on your knees?”

Maeglin had had his eyes fastened on the table top and did not see what his mother’s words did to his father’s face. But he learned what they did to his father’s heart and mind when his father’s meat knife flew through the air and imbedded in the back of his mother’s chair a bull’s eye from the place her face had been seconds before.

Maeglin’s body tucked in like a turtle in its shell as his breathing leapt to a rabbit’s racing one. His mother did not cower like Maeglin. Her lip curled. “Struck a nerve, did I?”

Maeglin could hear the harsh rasp of his father’s breath tearing out of his throat. His father’s voice dropped to freezing temperatures, “Get out.”

“Don’t like it when your captives fight back? You like them pliant and chained, do you? Got a taste for it among your Orc friends?”

His father stood with the cry of a beast, flipping the table. It crashed onto the wall. He pounced on her like a lion with jaws open to ripe her throat out with its teeth. His hands wrapped around her neck. She fought back with a snarl and striking hands and kicking legs, but she was pinned in her chair, his weight bearing down on her.

His father was murdering his mother. Maeglin broke out of his trembling turtle shell and latched onto his father’s arm, trying to break its hold on his mother’s neck, “No, Fath—”

His father growled, fangs and animal eyes, and threw out the arm Maeglin was trying to pry loose. His hand grabbed Maeglin’s in a grip so tight Maeglin thought his bones would break, and flung Maeglin away. Maeglin flew through the air. His head exploded in pain. Blackness swallowed him.

His head felt cracked open like a nut shell. It was cradled on a warm lap though. Shaking hands roved over his face, petting his skin and hair and body. Someone wept over him, making desperate little sounds that clenched in his heart.

He cracked his eyes open. His father’s face hovered above his, upside down with Maeglin’s head pillowed in his lap. “Father?” his voice was a weak rasp.

His father’s eyes flew open. “My son, my son,” his hands ran over Maeglin again and again, as if they thought they would forget the shape of him if they didn’t have him under them. His father curled him close, tears falling onto Maeglin’s cheeks, “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to. Please, Maeglin, I didn’t mean to!”

Maeglin tried to lift his hand, but it was caught in the grip of another’s. He looked over and saw his mother holding his hand, face pale, mouth a grim white line. But she smiled at him when their eyes met, and squeezed his hand. “You are returned to me.” She let him go and stood. “I will fetch the healer and be back soon, my son.” Then, with a disgusted look at Eöl, “ _Someone_ has to see to your needs before their own.” She strode from the room.

His father showed no sign of hearing her. He had sunk too far down the black tunnel he’d fallen into. He pulled Maeglin fully into his lap, clinging to him, rocking him, and begging him in broken whimpers to forgive him, that he hadn’t meant to hurt him, he was sorry, please, please don’t leave him.

Maeglin hugged his father’s neck and whispered that it was all right now, he wasn’t leaving, he loved him, he loved him, he forgave him. His father never meant to lose his temper and go down into the black tunnel, but sometimes his mother said such vile things his father couldn’t stop himself. Maeglin forgave him. His father had dark, terrible hurts inside his head. He was sick like Mother was. They never meant to hurt him. They couldn’t help it. 

*

His father took him to the Western border of Nan Elmoth where rich deposits of iron and copper ores had been discovered by his father years ago. His father had dug shafts into the rocky lands there, following the veins of metal deep into the earth. In that part of the forest the trees were thin, but the enchantments his father had hung about Nan Elmoth let no more sunlight in than an overcast day. 

It was in these rocky outcroppings that his father discovered the Galvorn metal from which he forged his armor, and the swords Anguirel and Anglachel.

Galvorn was a black metal so strong it would turn away any blade, outclassing even Mithril in strength, and laughed in the face of steel. The metal had surrendered itself to his father’s fashioning because it felt the reverence in his touch. It sang under the skill of his hands, delighting in the life and form he gave it.

The land was gorged like a wild boar had taken its tusks to it. A great rip split the rocky cliffs, a testament to a forgotten riverbed the River Celion had once ran though Nan Elmoth. Now all that remained were these naked rocks, stripped of soil.

His father led him down the steep embankment, trusting Maeglin, despite his youth, to scale without trouble. When his father was ten feet above the old riverbed, he jumped, falling the remaining distance. The bed of shingle crunched under his boots as he took the fall with only a loosening of his legs, catching it in bent knees. 

“Jump,” his father commanded him, lifting his arms to catch him. Maeglin hesitated. He was perched higher on the precipitous’ slope. 

“Jump, Maeglin,” his father called again, and Maeglin did. It was terrifying and exhilarating, and felt like trust and safety when his father’s arms snatched him out of the air, his father having leapt to meet him as he fell. His father landed with the grace of a cat on the rocky riverbed, Maeglin in his arms.

His father set him on his feet and began cutting his way to the black mouths of the mines. Maeglin was quick on his heels. It was not his first visit to the mines, but his father had first taken him here only a few years ago, and he was not as familiar with them as he wished. 

He delighted in the seeking out of ore veins, tracing them in the bedrock with his fingers, and feeling the satisfaction of a rich find. He loved the way his mind spun a thousand designs while his pick struck the rock, using the mindless task to run free on the paths of creation, the movement of his body helping to stimulate his mind. It was in the deep shafts, performing the most basic of manual labor, that his best ideas had fallen upon him.

So it was today. In-between his father’s instruction and the stories and plans his father shared of taking Maeglin to see the Khazâd for the first time, Maeglin let his mind wander a creator’s dream, like a spider spinning a silver masterpiece, each web as unique and beautiful as it was delicate and dangerous. 

His father led him back out of the mines and under the gray sky. Without the trees blocking any glimpse of the sky, Maeglin took the opportunity to crane his neck up and observe the clouds above. His mother told him the sky was a natural blue, nothing like the muted shades of gray he knew. But even though this sky was bland of color, Maeglin thought it beautiful. The monochrome grey rolled in waves like water, a sheet of silver opal.

His father picked a path through rocks thrown like giants’ toys. He held up his hand, the gesture pulling Maeglin to a stop. He listened for a moment. Maeglin heard it too: a tinkling of water. His father cut to the right, leading them around the belly of an enormous boulder. A natural spring bubbled out of a crook in the cliff, trickling down the sheer slope, catching to pool in a ledge here and there, and staining the rock pink and silver with minerals.

His father crouched down where the trickle of water reached the old riverbed and formed a deep, still pool. “Here,” he beckoned Maeglin over, “it is time you learned more of the Land’s magick.”

Maeglin’s interest piqued. He crouched down beside his father and turned attentive eyes and ears on him.

“All the Quendi who were not lured into the West once worshiped the Land. But then the Maia Melian took dominion over Doriath and poisoned the hearts of the Quendi there until they forsook the ways of our people.”

His father’s fingers trailed over the water’s surface, caressing it like rose petals. “Do you know where the Land’s Power is drawn from?” His father never imparted new knowledge until Maeglin could prove he’d remember his last lesson. To his father knowledge was gems, and if Maeglin could not take care of the ones his father had already entrusted to him, then he had not earned the right for more.

“The souls of the dead,” Maeglin answered with confidence.

His father hummed his approval. “All Quendi have magick in their _fëar_. We are born with it and we die with it. When we die we join with the Land which nourished us all our lives.”

His father dipped his fingers into the pool, before pulling his hand out and watching the water drop like tears off his fingertips. “Do you know what gives us the ability to wield the Land’s magick?”

Maeglin knew this as well. It was the cornerstone upon which all else stood. Everything was tied into it. “Sacrifice.” The Land’s Power turned and breathed on sacrifice. 

The corner of his father mouth turned up in a smile, and his father’s fingers came up to brush Maeglin’s cheek. His cheek bloomed under the caress. “What I shall teach you now, Maeglin, is one of the most difficult arts of our people: scrying. The Land’s magick does not bend itself willingly to scrying pools, only with a blood sacrifice can it be achieved. And the Land’s magick will not consent to being contained or bound to stone or gem at all.”

“But Mother—” Maeglin choked off the words.

His father gave him a sharp look. “What does _she_ know about the Land? Nothing.”

Maeglin dropped his eyes. He did not voice his confusion or seek answers to his questions. He should not have brought the Noldor into the space between his father and him. He knew better. 

But he would not find his answers from his mother’s mouth either. His father was right; his mother knew nothing about the Land, and little of creation. She would not be able to tell him how the Seeing Stones she’d spoken of in her tales that could reach across seas and mountain ranges, and find any person no matter the distance, worked. 

His father continued, judging the matter closed, “The Land’s Power runs through all of Endor, connecting it into one organism. Think of scrying as looking through the Land’s eyes. A sacrifice of blood opens the windows of those eyes, but we must remember,” his father’s voice dropped heavy with warning, “that while the Land’s Power is the collection of our people’s _fëar_ , the Power collects into a single force devoid of humanity. The Land does not care about individual lives, nor is it mindful of hurts it might inflict in the one calling up its Power. If you give a sacrifice it will accept it, even if you do not have the strength of body or mind to wield the Power you called up.”

“I will show you how it is done, but you will not attempt scrying until you are of age, and you must _never_ try to scry alone. Not until your life stretches before you in centuries.” Maeglin was disappointed with the restrictions, but his father would not give the warning without reason.

His father pulled out the steel knife he always carried in his boot. He held his hand over the pool and set the blade to his palm. With the steady hand of experience, he cut a shallow slice in his palm. He made a fist over the pool, watching as the water ate the dripping blood. Then he spread his hand flat, skimming it over the water’s surface just shy of disturbing its gently rippling depths. His voice lifted in the language of stars, the Quendi’s most ancient tongue. He sang for the Land to give ear and hear his request, calling out for the Land to lend him its Power.

The Land answered. It was just a shifting of awareness in the air, a heavier feel as if something immense and dangerous had cracked open a sleepy eye, puffed out a breath from a boulder-sized nostril and sent it rushing over the two crouching Quendi. But Maeglin knew, even though his experience with the Land’s Power was limited and he’d never before witnessed a ritual involving blood, that this presence settling heavy-lidded eyes on his nape and a pair of warning talons in his shoulders was just scraping the surface of the Power the Land could call up.

His father shuddered next to him, and Maeglin turned to see his father’s face slack and eyes blank, as if drunk upon something Maeglin only felt the echo of. His father moaned as if in intense pleasure or pain, and terror stabbed through Maeglin, shooting up his spine and cramping his belly. What if this was what his father had spoken of? It was almost like his father had lost himself in the Power, his individuality overwhelmed by a mammoth collective. What if his father didn’t have the strength—?

His father shook himself, like a cat shaking water from its coat, and awareness came back sharp and fierce to nestle in eyes so dark they bled into black, but weren’t black because the long points of his father’s irregular pupils were not lost in the irises.

“Look, Maeglin,” his father called his attention back to the scrying. The water’s surface rippled, little waves that shouldn’t have been able to form in a den of water this small, crashed against each other. “Look,” his father said again, bending over the pool, “the sea.”

Maeglin leaned forward, eyes fixed on the picture revealed. It was the sea. He knew it instinctively though he’d never seen a body of water larger than a forest pool. 

It was blue and yet was not. A grey that reminded him of a Nan Elmoth sky, and a green too, like forest leaves, mixed with the blue. It was a beach somewhere, shores smooth and pure as if they’d never known a footprint. He plunged deeper, and it wasn’t just a picture painted on a pool’s surface anymore. He heard a strange bird calling, and found he could crane his neck and see the belly of a large, white bird above him. His feet sunk into the sand like his toes had sunk into the steam’s mud as a child. And then he heard it, a sound of eternity, of death and rebirth, the cycles of the seasons and life, the sound of the Land’s Power. It was the ocean’s breathing, a whoosh as the waves broke the shore and a hiss as they went back out again. 

Then Maeglin crouched on the rocks again, a thousand miles away from that serenity, his mind cramped with a dozen faces he yearned to seek out: his grandfather Fingolfin, his brave and generous uncle Fingon, and his patient uncle Turgon. And the sons of Fëanor, his cousins Curufin and Celebrimbor who were just like him, and his mighty hunter of a cousin Celegorm, and all the other cousins who had entered his mother’s tales. But he could ask his father for none of their faces. 

Bitterness bloomed in his chest, a thistle of thorns and spiked heads. He was the prize his parents waged war over. His mother was forever seducing him with visions of family and a whole world out there awaiting him, the birthright of a prince that was slipping him by. But how quick that tongue that spun such visions lashed across his father’s face, drawing lines of blood and unleashing a wounded animal in his father’s eyes. His father with his shut ears and tight-mouthed displeasure when the word Noldor rode the air, and the way Maeglin’s shoulders hunched up under the cold fist in his father’s voice that made Maeglin feel like he must half himself, because half of him was hateful, was Lómion, and his father only wanted to hold Maeglin Starchild close.

They would not be satisfied until he utterly renounced half of himself. He had to choose: Noldor or the Free People. They’d tilled the ground and planted the seeds of this thistle of bitterness, but he could not let it run wild in the garden of his heart and turn him into an ugly, throne-edged thing. 

He fisted the bitter thorns and uprooted them with the words he fell asleep to so many nights: they were sick. They couldn’t help it. Terrible hurts had been carved into his father’s mind, that was why he lost himself in the darkness sometimes, and why his lip curled around the taste of Noldor. His mother was trying so hard to fight her way out of her shell and come back to him. He must forgive them both, always. They could not help that they were sick, and he loved them both so much, please, please don’t make him choose.


	37. Chapter 32

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 32

Maeglin chose his attire with care for his second Great Task. He bypassed the clothing his mother had sewn for him in the style of a Noldo, and dawned buckskin, leaving his hair unbound as was fitting for a child of the Free People. He would have to earn the right to tie his hair in the high horse-tails the Wolf Clan’s warriors favored. 

The Clan painted his face with white clay, a mask over his identity. He would be No-name until he earned his identity back. They slapped a knife into his hand, and sent him out on his Task. If he could overcome his fear, prove his resourcefulness and cunning, his existence would be acknowledged again with the completion of the Task. The only other supplies the Clan sent him out into the forest with was flint, a length of twine for setting snares, and a water skin. They told him not to come back until he carried the paw of a bear with him.

It took him a week. His body shook with the cold of autumn nights and his back was in agony, but he got his name back. He threw the hacked-off paw down in the stone circle before the Clan. He stood straight as a young beech tree, refusing to betray how much pain he was in. The bear had ranked its claws down his back. The wound was on its way towards sealing, despite the primitiveness of his medical care, but it had hurt worse than anything he’d ever experienced when that massive weight crashed into him, a roar in his ears and its hot, terrifying breath in his face. 

His father led him back to the house after, taking him to his father’s bedroom and instructing him to lie down on the bed. His father sat down beside him, and laid a hand on his back. His father’s hand touched him light as a sparrow’s wing, but even that was too heavy to keep the hiss of pain tucked behind his teeth.

“Lie still,” his father whispered and left to retrieve the healing kit. When he returned, he helped Maeglin pull the buckskin tunic off. As it came the bandages Maeglin had wrapped around his back stuck to the wounds. He’d thought it had been healing, but it must have re-opened. 

His father soothed a hand over the curve of Maeglin’s shoulder, skirting around the wound, and eased him back onto bed. Then he untied the twine holding the cloth lid over a jar of gum of the gilead plant. A clean scent bloomed into the room as if a window had been thrown open. Gently his father smoothed the gum into the oozing claw marks running from Maeglin’s right shoulder to his left hip. 

As gentle as his father’s touches were, Maeglin couldn’t press all the little sounds of pain into the compressed line of his mouth. His father murmured soft words to him of how proud he was to call Maeglin his son as his fingers doused some of the fire eating Maeglin’s back. Even though his father had spoken of his pride in him before, Maeglin still soaked it in like sunlight.

When his father had finished soothing Maeglin’s back, he set the jar of gum aside and wound clean strips of healing gauze around Maeglin’s body. Then he told Maeglin to rest, and dropped a kiss into his shoulder. Maeglin felt the bed lift as his father rose, and heard the soft sound of the door’s closing. His eyes drifted shut with the exhaustion of the past week, but a glow of victory warmed his chest. He had proven himself. 

He woke with the morning in a tangle of limbs. His father and Breglos had climbed into bed with him in the night. Breglos, spooned up against him, didn’t irritate the wound. It was wrapped and well on its way to proper healing now. 

There wouldn’t even be a scar left in evidence by the end of the week. Maeglin’s body was healthy, his _fëa_ untainted by the touch of Darkness. Only Quendë like his father who endured long torment bore scars.

His father’s face lay next to his on the pillow. His father’s breath sighed softly to the rhythm of sleep. Maeglin lifted his hand and brushed the hair back from its soft fall against his father’s cheek. He wished he woke up like this every morning, sheltered in their arms, at peace.

Breglos shifted against him, stirring. Breglos’ arm tightened around his waist for a moment, slotting him closer, before he awoke fully and drew back with a soft query if Maeglin’s back still hurt. Maeglin eased out from under his father’s leg twining their calves together, and sat up, turning to face Breglos. “No. It is healing well.”

Breglos smiled up at him, and lifted his hand to run it lazily through Maeglin’s river of loose hair tumbled down to the pillows. “Off you get then. You need a bathe after a week in the wilds.”

Maeglin grinned and rose. He snagged up his tunic that his father had left folded on the chair, and retreated to his own room. He took a long bath, selected his Noldo clothing, and braided his hair the way his mother had shown him. He was Lómion now, for he went to visit his mother in her rooms.

His mother, his real mother, had come back to him last month. He wished he had not had to leave her for a whole week when she needed him, but the timing of the Great Tasks was pre-ordained. He was back now though, and would take care of her.

He found her caught in dreams, but he was not a small child anymore. He was fourteen, almost a man. He could help his mother as he had not been able to as a child.

He climbed into the bed with her and slipped her body into his arms. It used to be her cradling him, but he was tall enough to hold her in his arms now. He smoothed the hair back from her face, and called her out of the dreams.

She stirred, a sluggish awakening. Her eyes struggled to focus on his face, but he spoke soft words to her and carded through her hair until she knew him. “Lómion,” she sighed, and pulled him closer. “My little prince.”

He dropped a kiss into her hair. “Yes, Mother, it is me.”

“You were not here. I missed you.”

He kissed her again. “I am sorry, Mother. I am here now.”

“Where did you go?”

He hesitated. “I was in the forest.”

She frowned, concern working its way into her eyes. “You should not be out there alone.” She searched his face, “You were doing something with the Wood-elves, weren’t you?”

“I…it was not anything to worry about, and I am back now.”

Her eyes slid away, shadows gathering inside them. “I worry for you. What will it be like for you when we make it home? These people…they are not doing anything _permanent_ to you, are they?” 

He felt every rune of the Cirth etched into his back, dividing him in two. “No.” He looked away. He wished she would drop it. 

She touched his cheek, drawing his eyes back to hers. Her eyes were pools of light and soft with love. “I am sorry I mentioned it. I just fear…but once we are home you will be—” her voice broke. “Oh, Lómion,” she pulled him tight against her. “My beautiful son, my little prince. I am so sorry. I did not save you. I was too weak. I could not…and now…now we will never go home.” Her body shook against his.

“Mother, it is all right.” 

Her breath kept catching in her throat, and then she could not hold back the tears anymore. He stroked her hair. She said, voice broken by tears and all these years of loneliness piled up in her throat, “I will never get…never get to see my father…I want…I want to go home. I want to go _home_.”

“I promise, Mother. When I am older, I will take you home. I promise. I will take you.” His mother needed to go home, even though it would hurt so bad to lose her. She needed to go home to his grandfather who would heal her. Maeglin would take her home. And he would meet his grandfather and uncle Fingon. But then he would come back to his home in Nan Elmoth. He would miss her terribly, but he would know she was home with her father and not pressed down by loneliness or caged up in her mind.

When the grey light of the sky had crept into darkness, he left his mother’s room, shutting the door softly behind him to not disturb her sleep. He had been able to chase the dreams away today, and they laid in the bed together, his mother telling him stories like she used to when he was a child.

He turned and made his way through the deep night shade towards his room. He paused when his father’s figure emerged from the shadows. His father’s eyes glimmered in the darkness, picking up and reflecting the smallest whisper of light. “You were with her a long time today,” his father’s voice ran deep as river water with all the shadows sunk inside it.

“Yes, Father.” His father’s eyes mapped all the curves in his face like hands roughened with the grains of desperation. They cupped him in a tight grip so his wrists could not slip from the circle of his father’s fingers.

Maeglin stepped forward, holding out his hand to his father. His father crossed the distance swiftly and grasped it. His other arm slipped around Maeglin’s waist and yanked Maeglin’s body against his for an embrace. Maeglin hugged his father back. 

His father said, voice low, “What were you talking about with her?”

Maeglin pushed back, lifting himself from his father’s chest. His father’s arm tightened around his waist, only letting him move back far enough to look up into his father’s face. But Maeglin didn’t. He looked off to the side, over his father’s shoulder. “That is between Mother and me.”

His father released Maeglin’s hand to sink his fingers into Maeglin’s hair and curl around the back of his skull, urging his face to turn up to his father’s. “She still wants to take you away from me. Even if her mood has shifted, that has not changed. What thoughts has she been filling your head with, my son?” 

Maeglin tried to step back from his father’s arms, but his father wouldn’t let him go. He stopped fighting, but refused to meet his father’s eyes. “Why must you do this? Don’t you know how much I—” He clamped his mouth over the words that would have spilled his longing for his mother into the air. His father wouldn’t take well to hearing how much Maeglin had missed her.

He’d only just gotten her back. And she wasn’t the same as the woman who said such terrible things to his father. His real mother wasn’t like that. She hadn’t gotten into one shouting match with his father since her return. 

His father’s hand slipped from his hold around his neck, curving down the path of his spine bearing his father’s mark. His father leaned down to press a kiss into Maeglin’s cheek. “I made you a present,” he whispered in his ear. “Come, let me show you.” He took Maeglin’s wrist and took them back to Maeglin’s bedroom.

His father shut the door behind them and gestured for Maeglin to go to the mirror. His father liked him to look at the way the gifts complemented his beauty. Maeglin went to the mirror and looked at himself. His body already bore the evidence of his father’s love in earrings of amethyst, black pearls and moonstones strung through his hair, and his favorite necklace. It was carved purely from jet, and the designs at its crux swung down in a soft clink of dangling tear-drops whenever he bent over.

His father came to stand behind him in the mirror and reached into his tunic breast to withdraw the gift. A cloth concealed it. “Take off your tunic.”

Maeglin obeyed, shrugging it off to stand naked from the waist up. His father took Maeglin’s hand and slipped on a silver bracelet. He slid it up Maeglin’s forearm and over his elbow, working it over the growing strength of Maeglin’s upper arm until it rested in the dip of muscle. 

Maeglin traced the twin wolf faces. They were beautiful, and so delicately crafted he felt the swirl of fur and the alpine lines of their faces under his fingertips. Their eyes glimmered with black diamonds. “It is beautiful, Father. Thank you.”

His father’s hands smoothed up Maeglin’s arms, coming to rest on his shoulders. He gazed at Maeglin in the mirror, fingers lifting to flick one of Maeglin’s earrings, sending it swinging, and follow the lines of the jet necklace down the path of Maeglin’s chest, leaving it where it met its ending on the swell of Maeglin’s breastbone to splay flat over Maeglin’s heart. He said nothing, everything told in the touch, the way his thumb lightly caressed Maeglin’s skin and his palm pressed hot and claiming over Maeglin’s heart. _His_. Maeglin Starchild. Not Lómion.

Maeglin felt wrapped in love, and split in two. He wished…but it didn’t matter what he wished. He could never be Maeglin Lómion.

His father turned him and took him into his arms. Maeglin went without a fight. His father’s nose nuzzled into his cheek in a kiss, like a hound butting its nose against a palm in greeting. Maeglin nuzzled back. 

At his response, his father’s hands cupped him closer, pulling him in where they pressed against the small of Maeglin’s back. His father’s lips dropped down to brush a kiss into his ear and whisper, “You cannot leave me. You are my son. My Maeglin. Promise you will never leave me.”

Maeglin looped his arms around his father’s neck. “I promise, Father. Nan Elmoth is my home. _You_ are my home.”

His father’s arms closed fully around him, curving Maeglin’s body flush against his father’s chest. He dropped kisses into Maeglin’s face. Maeglin gathered all the love up, as hungry for it as he had been as a child. When his father whispered that he should come sleep in the bed with Breglos and him, Maeglin said yes. 

His father took his hand and led him to his bedroom. Maeglin walked in first, his father following in behind him. Breglos was already lying in the bed. Even though it was autumn, he had thrown the furs off his body and lay sleeping naked on his belly. 

His father snatched Maeglin back, turning him around so he could not look. Maeglin opened his mouth to ask what was wrong, but stopped at the panicked look on his father’s face. “Father?”

His father’s eyes swept over him, taking in the whole of him. Maeglin shifted under the intensity of the look, not understanding, but sensing a change, a shifting. “You are too young,” his father said, voice a choked breath.

“Too young for what?”

His father didn’t seem to be listening; his eyes kept darting between Maeglin and the bed. “I had not thought—but you are older now. It would not be…”

But didn’t his father just say he was too young? Now he was too old? “What is it, Father?” He stepped forward, taking his father’s hand.

His father looked down at their clasped hands. “You should go back to your room.” Maeglin dropped his hand, stepping back, chest closing in a fist. His father reached out and grabbed him, pulling him into his arms. Maeglin clung to him. Why was he being sent away? His father petted his hair, stroking the path of his spine. “You are growing up now,” he murmured. “It would be a mistake to take you into the bed, even if I did not mean…it would be a mistake.”

Maeglin drew his head back and looked into his father’s face. “Why, Father? I slept in the bed with you and Breglos last night. Why are you sending me away now?”

His father kissed his temple, “Hush, I am not sending you away. I am only saying to go back to your own bed now. I will come get you in the morning.”

But it had felt perfect waking up that morning in the bed with his father and Breglos. Why must things be different? He lay his head down on his father’s chest, holding him tight, wanting his father to change his mind and let him stay.

“You are too old now, Maeglin,” his father said in his ear.

“But you said I was too young,” he protested one last time. “How can I be too young and too old at once?”

His father’s mouth lifted in a crook of smile, the lines that had creased his face since he saw Breglos lying in the furs smoothing out. He touched Maeglin’s cheek, “You are old enough to be curious about adult things now, but too young to go wandering into beds seeking pleasure.”

Heat raced into Maeglin’s cheeks as he finally understood what his father had been talking about all this time. “Oh,” he stepped back from his father’s arms, shy. His eyes flickered without his permission back to the bed, to Breglos’ naked body spread out over it. _Oh_. “I…I think I will go back to my room now.”

He made to slip passed his father, but his father caught his wrist and pulled him back. He pressed a kiss into Maeglin’s hair. “Goodnight.” 

“Goodnight, Father.” His father released him and Maeglin shut the door behind him, cheeks hot and belly swooping wild as a diving hawk.

*

The magick curled off Eöl’s fingers. It leapt to life in the hearth, a silver fire working up from shy licks of flame into a burst of light. The flames crackled in shades of silver: a flash of pure silver-white, the glint of a polished steel blade, and the dark grey of pregnant rainclouds.

He sat back on his heels, bare toes sinking into the soft fur of the reindeer hide. Thinfin and Morfin padded closer. Morfin pressed his nose up against Eöl’s shoulder, and Eöl scratched him behind the ears. The wolves circled around the furs before settling on the floor together.

Arms slipped around Eöl from behind, a chin dropping into his shoulder. Breglos’ unbound hair swung forward. It shone like strings of pearls in the silver light. Eöl turned his mouth and kissed the tip of Breglos’ ear. The glass beads ringing its curve glittered, and the diamond earrings Eöl had made for him winked star-bright.

“You are worrying too much,” Breglos murmured, kissing Eöl’s neck. “Maeglin will come to no harm.”

Eöl turned his head away, staring into the licking flames. The flames danced with the memories haunting him of another young man he’d loved with thick hair black as shadows. “He is too young.” 

He had already made so many mistakes with Maeglin. He’d _hurt_ him. He never meant to, but that didn’t change the blood he’d painted on Maeglin’s skin or the bruises. When Eöl could not see through the darkness flashing blood-wet fangs, he hurt his Maeglin. 

Breglos sighed softly against Eöl’s neck. Eöl shivered as hot breath hit skin wet with kisses. “He is not too young. He is nearly seventeen now. And the entire point of the Wild Hunt is to welcome him into adulthood. Besides, it is not as if Maeglin will take the role of Stag. He will be the Wolf, yes, but I have never been caught. I make a _very_ good Stag,” Breglos’ mouth formed the shape of a smile against Eöl’s skin.

When the Harvest Moon rose, one of the Four Days of Chaos was ushered in. The spirits of the dead ran beside the living like a field of wildflowers, each _fëar_ burning with its own flame. It was the time of the Wild Hunt, when the Wolf hunted the Stag. 

The Wild Hunt would be Maeglin last Great Task. Maeglin would face no bears, but he would meet the naked Power of the Land when it was awake and aware. It would be hungry for sacrifice, playful in celebration of the renewal of the seasons, and _dangerous_.

It was less than a decade since the Direwolf last walked among them. It shouldn’t be abroad that night, but Eöl couldn’t bear the thought of Maeglin encountering it. And, though the risk of the Direwolf’s claiming was the greatest horror, it was not the only danger.

A stag was a symbol of the hunted, the victim of the wolves every other day of the year. But on the day of the Wild Hunt, when the world flipped and the strongest Quendë took the place of the Stag and was hunted, the stag became a symbol of power and beauty precisely because it would never be caught. If the Stag were caught, it would be ‘killed’ by the Wolf: dominated, its wild beauty brought down and possessed.

The Wild Hunt was brutal to both Wolf and Stag. The mind was reduced to little more than instincts. Eöl had felt it, the animalist hunger of the Wolf for the kill that overcame every human emotion, until he had to fight to remember his very name. 

But Maeglin’s mind was stronger. Stronger than any other’s he’d ever encountered. The magick would not damage it. Eöl’s fear for Maeglin took a different path, “I know it is an unlikely possibility, but if Maeglin _should_ catch you, he will have you. It can be violent and…I know he will be a man full-grown on the Hunt’s other side, but to have his first bedding come through violence—I do not like it.”

Breglos fell quiet, resting his chin on Eöl’s shoulder, holding him loosely in his arms. Eöl’s spine curved into the hard planes of his mate’s chest, and he stroked Breglos’ bare, smooth thigh in lazy patterns. Finally Breglos said, “I too would not wish his first sexual act to be in such circumstances. I still do not think he will catch me, but perhaps you should speak with him about finding a bed to wander into before the Hunt.”

“I have thought that myself, but who would lay with him before he completes the Hunt? He is still a child until that hour. And there are no other young ones to explore with.”

“I know your fears of his lying with another too young, you know I do,” Breglos whispered, voice cradling Eöl’s naked heart passed to him in confidence after that day a young Maeglin was exposed to the sight of Eöl and Aredhel rutting on the floor. “But I hardly think a day or two will make a difference. Let him find a partner sometime in the week before the Hunt. It will not do him any harm, and do him much good should he catch me.”

“Very well. But I would have you speak to him of this. I…I do not want to make a mistake with my words.” 

Breglos dropped a kiss into his shoulder. “I will speak to him tomorrow.”

*

The Harvest Moon was a huge orb in the sky. Silver fingers crawled into all the dark places of the forest, seeking out hovels they rarely explored. On this one night of the year his father pulled back the enchantments of Nan Elmoth and let the moon rule the night. 

Breglos stood alone in the Stone Circle. The Wolf Clan ringed him like a pack of wolves. It was time. 

The eyes of the wolf pelt draped over his father’s head glittered dangerously in the moonlight. All the Quendi of the Wolf Clan had pulled the pelts over their heads. The skinned pelts falling down their backs gave faces Maeglin had know all his life a new, ravenous appearance. His eyes trailed to the stag skin resting at Breglos’ feet, the massive antlers still attached. He had no idea how Breglos was supposed to run with that kind of weight on his head.

His father’s eyes locked with his, a silent question passed between them: are you ready? Maeglin pulled back his shoulders, standing tall, his hair swinging against the dip of his spine. He would prove himself and make his father proud. 

A knife flashed silver in the moonlight as his father held up his fist, turning to face the Clan. As one they raised fists of silver with him, daggers pointed at the sky. Maeglin’s was there among them, one of them.

His father lowered the blade and sliced a cut across his palm. The Clan followed suit. “With blood we call up the Land’s might. With blood is payment met. With blood is Power sated.” The Clan let their blood drip into the hungry earth.

His father turned to Breglos, hand dripping dark red and cradling the silver knife. The Stag did not give blood. The bloodletting was a sacrifice. But the Stag _was_ the sacrifice this night.

Yet the Stag needed a sacrifice of blood to ride the magick. His father stopped in front of Breglos, eyes shining like gems as they threw back the light. His father raised his bloody hand and traced Breglos’ lips with his blood, wetting them generously. 

“With blood,” Breglos’ voice rang strong, carrying around the Stone Circle.

“This is the night magick renews itself, the night the Land cries out in power,” his father continued the ritual words. “We crown Chaos lord of the night. May we be unbound! May we drink freedom this night!” his father lifted his fist in the air and pulled a cry from the Clan. 

The Land sang beneath Maeglin’s feet, a wild, primal beat in his heels. The stars wheeled overhead, white diamonds in the sky. The moon’s light seemed to invade his pores, bursting from his skin, crushing his mind and sharpening his soul with the force that moved tides and warped the body of the Earth. 

Then the weight lampooning him cast him off, turning to run like a burst of fireworks through the woods. Naked _fëar_ streaked through the night. The air was saturated with Power. It reduced him to a child, all his knowledge to gathered trinkets, and his strength to a babe’s fists.

“Come, you must prepare the Stag.” His father’s voice called him back to the clearing, to the sway of eager trees and the familiar Power drumming beneath his feet, working up his calves, threatening to buckle his knees.

Breglos stripped off his leggings, letting them fall in a discarded pile with his boots. He’d worn no shirt. None of them had. He shone silver as beach bark in the moonlight, hair luminous as pearl-dust. He stood tall and proud, awaiting Maeglin’s approach.

Maeglin swallowed and stepped into the circle. He took a deep breath and picked up his place in the ritual. His voice rang out, confident and strong, bypassing his soft-spoken ways to fall into something greater than himself. “Let the Stag surrender to the Land’s guidance.” His hands only carried a light tremor as he lifted the dark cloth and blindfolded Breglos. As he curved around Breglos’ shoulder to tie the blindfold, taking a care with Breglos’ hair that slipped like the cocoons of silk worms through his fingers, he realized that sometime over the last few years he’d matched Breglos’ height. “Let the Stag run the paths of cunning. Let him be reborn in darkness.”

He dipped his fingers into the jar of oil his father held ready for him. When his fingers wore a glove of oil, he touched three fingers into the center of Breglos’ breastbone. “Let the Stag run free, proud, and swift.”

He began the work of slicking Breglos’ body with oil. His cheeks picked up a flush as he worked his hands over the soft skin, curving around muscles and feeling all the hard planes and gentle dips of Breglos’ body. He’d never touched someone so intimately before. His hands started trembling, belly twisting into knots. 

Breglos had encouraged him to find a bed to wander into before the Hunt, and Maeglin promised he would. He had meant to, only, when it came down to it, he found himself too shy to approach any of the adults he’d known all his life with the offer of sharing their bed. Maybe if he had burned for someone in particular he could have worked up the courage, but there had never been anyone who caught his eye.

He found it difficult to control his body’s reactions as he touched Breglos’ now. Breglos was so beautiful, and touching him like this stirred lust in Maeglin he had never known. When Breglos went down to his knees in the grass, Maeglin fumbled with the jar of oil, almost dropping it, and thought his face and ears must have turned ripe as a berry. He didn’t look at any of the faces circling them and watching silently as Maeglin fumbled and blushed and probably looked a right fool (or virgin).

He went down on his knees behind Breglos. His hands shook so badly everyone in the Clan must see. He took a deep breath and slicked his fingers to the hilt, scooping up a generous serving of oil. He lifted his other hand and rested it hesitantly on the curve of Breglos’ hip, feeling the bud of hipbone. The skin was slick and the flesh yielding under his hand that had tightened sometime between his hesitant touch and becoming a touch that liked the feel of Breglos’ body in his hand.

His slicked fingers moved between Breglos’ thighs. There was no chance of him catching Breglos when he ran as Stag, everyone said Breglos had never been caught. Preparing Breglos in this way was unnecessarily, but his father had told him that a considerate Wolf prepared the Stag and saw to the Stag’s care before and after the Hunt.

His fingers brushed against Breglos’ entrance. He hardly breathed, his awareness honing to the feel of his finger slipping inside. He licked his lips and pushed in deeper, hand tightening on Breglos’ hip. He slipped in a second finger. His breathing accelerated, and heat curled in his belly, spreading out like a hot hand splayed over his stomach. He began to harden.

The tips of his ears burned. Everyone could see. Breglos showed no sign of impatience, but Maeglin feared he was tolerating his touch with the amusement of an elder so far outstripping Maeglin that Maeglin was but a fumbling child, or a youth who spilled himself at a touch. 

He wormed a third finger inside, opening more of that tight heat, and tried to stop thinking about what it would feel like around him. His eyes trailed up the delicate curve of Breglos’ spine, reading the marking shimmering like moon-runes: Breglos Starchild, son of Beleg Starborn. Breglos had pulled his milk-white hair forward, and Maeglin stared at the back of his neck, the little dusting of hairs, the canal of his spine, the temptation of his skin. It looked soft and lovely, and Maeglin wanted to press his mouth into it and learn its taste.

He startled when fingers touched down on his shoulder. His head snapped up. His father’s eyes met his. His father’s face was carefully neutral, wiped of emotion, as was his voice when he said, “He is ready.”

Maeglin ducked his head, stomach cramping with guilt and confusion. He should not have looked at his father’s mate with desire. Breglos had all but raised him alongside his father! 

He carefully withdrew his fingers, and clamped down on the disappointment of leaving Breglos’ body (without putting something else inside). He stood. He could do nothing about the evidence of how much he’d liked the feel of Breglos. He forced his body not to hunch around the betrayal and cover himself, but his face _burned_. It was all so humiliating. 

Breglos rose gracefully from the grass and turned. Maeglin’s eyes darted up. His breath caught. Breglos’ hair was a mesh of light, every line in his body perfection: his mouth shaped like lust, his eyes so green Maeglin wanted to dive inside them. He shouldn’t. And he probably wouldn’t like what he saw anyway. Breglos was probably thinking about Maeglin as a child, remembering him when he was a skinny-legged little thing. 

Breglos’ mouth curved into a smile, and he touched Maeglin’s shoulder. “It was only natural,” he whispered. 

Maeglin swallowed, and nodded, eyes dropping. “I am sorry.” He slid a glance over to his father, including him in the apology.

His father flicked his fingers, dismissive, “It is as Breglos said: a natural reaction. Let us move on.” He bent and picked up the heavy headdress of antlers and deerskin. He held it out for Maeglin.

Maeglin accepted it. It would be a heavy weight on Breglos’ head. He lifted it and lowered it into Breglos’ cloud of hair. He adjusted it until it balanced well. He stepped back and stared. Breglos looked feral and fierce, and _beautiful_. Maeglin looked away.

He could feel the Land stretching in the back of his mind, licking its lips and ready to hook him into the mindless chaos of the Wild Hunt. Soon, his father had warned him, he would be fighting to remember this face was Breglos’ face. He wanted to prove himself and keep his head, but tonight he would experience magick on another level. His father said the forest came _alive_ during the Wild Hunt. Tree roots erupted from the earth and latched onto legs, tangling in feet or springing out of the way on the Land’s whim. Whole hills could punch a head through the earth, or rivers divert. Chaos reigned tonight and played as it pleased.

As if the Land had heard him and sprung to answer, Power rose up out of the earth. He almost lost his footing at the sheer magnitude of it. It rocked him like a boat at sea and he saw some of the Clan go down. Then there was no more time for thought. The Land sang so loudly it beat in his ears like a frantic heartbeat, wild and deep. 

The trees called, rustling leaves crying out: “Run, run, run, little deer!” And the Stag ran, shooting out of the circle, making a break for the chanting trees. The Stag’s skin glittered like starlight on snow from the oils coating it.

A breath, a chance to steady his paws, and the Wolf was off, plunging after the Stag into the night beneath the trees. 

The trees allied with the Stag this Wild Hunt. They threw up roots, and branches swept down to try and knock against the Wolf’s skull. The Wolf lost sight of the Stag again and again even though the air hissed in his lungs and his legs pumped. He’d left his pack behind, but that was alright, the Stag was his to catch. 

The Land decided this was no fun, and the Wolf howled to see the Stag suddenly before him, stuck like a fly on a spider’s web. Its slender legs were trapped in mud that had no reason besides the Land’s mischief to be there. The Wolf wanted to taste the heady scent of the Stag’s fear, but the Stag did not panic and flail. The Stag couldn’t clear the patch of mud, even with the powerful muscles in its delicious looking haunches bunching, but it jumped _into_ the trees. Its hooves swung its body through the branches, leaping gracefully from bough to bough.

The song beneath the Wolf’s paws told him the Land pouted at its thwarted play. But the Wolf was not going to be out-smarted by the Stag. The trees were his enemies, but the earth his friend, and the earth made a better friend because he could run after the Stag faster than it could leap through the trees.

The Wolf was distracted by shinny things running at his side, colorful wisps of light. The Land told him to focus, they were just the dead come out to play. They looked at him with eyes of light and ginned like foxes. 

The Wolf swung, leaving off his hunt to try and catch into one of the light spirits, but it flittered away before flirting back over again. They ran circles around him. He sprinted for them, but they dropped into the earth. He thought he’d lost his chance, but they popped up again right in front of him and he plowed into them, not having time to skid away. He passed right though their insubstantial forms, getting a flash of things past and seeing things he did not comprehended, before he was off again.

The Land grew bored, wanting the fun to come back. It shook the tree roots, causing their limbs to shudder and quake, and the Stag was shaken right out of their arms. The Wolf’s teeth closed an inch from the Stag’s hunches. So close, but it was up and running again. It leaped over tree roots limber as a doe. 

Then the Land opened at their feet, shooting a wide rushing stream into their path like a vein through an arm. But the Stag was already leaping it even as the Wolf’s paws skidded to a stop at the bank. The Stag’s hoofs splayed behind it, belly catching a current of air and soaring like a flying fish over the water’s surface.

The Stag hit the opposite bank with a roll that snapped off the entire side of one of its antlers which it left stuck in the earth like a pike. The Land folded the stream in the snap of massive jaws, and the Wolf sprang after the Stag.

They ran without hindrance or assistance now. Just the Wolf and Stag. The Stag was a flash of white lightning, but the Wolf was a hair’s breadth faster, and steadily ate the ground between them. The song rose, reaching for its crescendo. The Wolf sprang, paws reaching for the Stag. The song exploded in triumph, and the Stag went down, caught and trapped beneath the Wolf’s panting body.

The Stag twisted like a wet eel under him, trying to get up and run, but the Wolf dug his nails into the Stag’s skin and used his muscular legs to keep him down. He snatched the Stag’s wrists and forced them above the Stag’s head as he straddled the Stag’s waist and ground his hips into the Stag’s stomach, declaring his victory and dominance.

The Land bayed like a hound in his ear, yes, yes, sate their lust within the Stag and bath the Land in seed, pollinating it, nourishing it like spring rains. The Wolf shifted, pressing his chest into the Stag’s, holding him down with his weight as he loosened his fingers from the Stag’s wrists. He used his freed hands to separate the Stag’s thighs and slither between them. He clenched the slick hips between his fingers, digging into sharp hipbones white as sea-foam. 

The Land roared like crashing surf, instincts to dominate and spill his seed flushed through every pore in the Wolf’s skin. But through the crashing surf and _need_ pounding through his body, a voice called to the Wolf. “Maeglin,” it called, “Maeglin.”

The Wolf looked into the face of the Stag calling him, and the mind beneath the animal sprung up, forcing the Wolf down by pure will alone until the paws holding the Stag down were hands about slippery shoulders, and the face he looked into had a name: Breglos.

Breglos under him. Breglos opened for his taking. Breglos spread like a sea of pearls on the grass. Breglos’ tight heat so close all Maeglin had to do was _push_ and he’d break through that tight ring of muscle and claim Breglos for his own.

The urge to _take_ surged powerful as a tidal wave in his mind, the immensity of a giant’s hand pressing down into him, flatting him under the weight of a Power he was but a bird caught in a sea gale against. But he braced himself. He could not lose himself to the Wolf. The tidal wave broke against the rocks of Maeglin. Maeglin wavered, but held control between the steel of his teeth, the might of his mind.

Breglos’ hand slipped under his hair, kneading the back of his neck. “That’s it, Maeglin, you are strong. You can find yourself.”

Maeglin’s teeth clenched, struggling, but refusing to buckle and lose himself again. He couldn’t get any words out; it was all he could do to jerk a nod. His hands fisted in the grass, tearing up chunks as his will battled for dominion of his own body, fighting the Power pressing at him to _finish it_. So close.

Breglos took his hands, prying them out of the dirt, and putting them back on his body. Maeglin gripped Breglos’ waist. “That’s it,” Breglos whispered, and wrapped one smooth calf around the back of Maeglin’s thigh, pulling him close. “Take your time now.” He stroked Maeglin’s back when a helpless sound of want pulled itself from Maeglin’s mouth. “Shh, everything is going to be all right. It is natural. You do not need to be afraid. Just finish this and the Land will let you go.” Breglos petted his hair, stroking him like a child, speaking to him like a child, offering him comfort like a scared little boy.

Maeglin wasn’t afraid. He was _desperate_. He couldn’t stand Breglos treating him like a child when he was a man, a man who wanted to make Breglos _burn_ with desire for him like he burned for Breglos.

His hands gripped Breglos’ hips, and he thrust in on one swift stroke into all that glorious heat and tightness. Breglos gasped. His lashes fluttered, lips parting. _Maeglin_ had put that look of pleasure on Breglos’ face. He would show Breglos he was no child, and he would have Breglos arching under him, crying out for more.

There was no shyness or hesitancy left now. He moved like a man inside Breglos, pulling gasps and moans of ecstasy from Breglos’ lust-formed mouth. He kissed that bed of temptation, slipping his tongue inside its heat and made Breglos arch under him. Breglos kissed him back, hands pulling Maeglin closer, legs wrapped around him, urging him deeper, more, Ah! Yes! Maeglin!

Maeglin brought Breglos to climax, reveling in the way Breglos cried out, senseless with pleasure, and melted into Maeglin’s arms. Maeglin collapsed, boneless, atop him, panting and coated in sweat and oil. He pressed kisses into Breglos’ neck, still craving the taste of him, still thrilling in the feel of Breglos in his arms, a panting, sated mess. Maeglin had done that. Maeglin had driven Breglos wild with desire for _him_.

“Maeglin,” hands took his face, turning it up to meet his father’s. 

Guilt slammed into him. He wanted _Breglos_ , not the Stag. What he wanted crossed the borders of a night flown high on Power and the Land’s hunger. He wanted Breglos tonight, and tomorrow night, and the next. He wanted to wander into Breglos’ bed.

“Father,” he croaked. He looked down at Breglos lying under him, moon-pale hair spread out on the grass, so beautiful Maeglin’s body stirred afresh. 

His father knelt beside them, hands sinking into Maeglin’s hair, calling his eyes back up. He lifted them even though he wanted to slide away from his father’s eyes. “Maeglin, are you hurt? Are you…was it too much? Are you _hurt_?”

His father was tearing himself up over worry and fear for Maeglin, and here Maeglin was wishing he had what his father did. He must uproot every thistle of resentment that Breglos would never be his. He would not allow them to poison his heart against his father. “I am all right, Father,” he whispered.

“Good. Good,” his father touched his face, his shoulders, then tried to pull Maeglin’s whole body into his arms, but Maeglin wasn’t a small child anymore; he had surpassed his father’s height and now had to look down to meet his eyes when they stood together in the forge. 

Maeglin lifted off Breglos, though he longed to lie entangled with him, and went into his father’s arms. His father held him close, hands shaking as they clutched at Maeglin, “I was afraid. I thought—but you are not hurt?”

Maeglin’s arms encircled his father’s waist with the strong arms of a man that eclipsed his father’s height and breadth of shoulder. “I am not hurt, Father. I promise.” And he would not let hurt grown in him when he looked upon that which was not his. 

Breglos sat up and touched his shoulder, his other hand dropping to the small of Eöl’s back. Eöl turned to take Breglos’ face in his hands, scanning it, received a soft smile, and kissed him. Maeglin watched them kiss. That was just how it was, and he would not grow a thicket of thorns in his heart.


	38. Chapter 33

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 33

“Father, may I speak with you?”

Eöl looked up at his son’s soft question. Maeglin stood in the Hearth Room’s doorway. The lapis lazuli earrings Eöl had made for him hung pretty as robin’s eggs from his son’s ears. Maeglin had swept his black hair up in the high tail signifying his earned status as a warrior in the Wolf Clan. Pearls and moonstones shimmered inside its dark fall. His son was more beautiful than all the jewels of the earth, and Eöl loved draping him in them and watching how Maeglin outshone them all.

He set his work aside and patted the spot in the fur couch beside him. “Come. Sit with me.” 

Maeglin walked to him with a smile and sat down. Eöl lifted a hand and caressed Maeglin’s cheek with his knuckles. Maeglin tilted into the touch like a kitten. Eöl petted his son for a time, stroking his silken skin and the rich river of his hair, comforted as he always was at the way Maeglin responded so beautiful to his touch, showing him that he loved his father and wanted no other.

“What did you want to speak to me about?” he asked as he traced the line of Maeglin’s spine, wishing Maeglin’s skin was bare under his eyes so he could watch his fingers travel the path of the marking declaring Maeglin as his.

Maeglin pulled back enough to look into Eöl’s face. Maeglin carried his hesitation in the lines about his mouth. Eöl smoothed them with his thumbs and murmured, “What is it, my son?” 

Maeglin licked his lips, leaving a wet shine behind. “I…Father, you know my mother is sick.”

Eöl frowned. He did not wish to speak of _her_. But he did not push Maeglin away; he pulled him closer, as if Aredhel might spring up and tear his son from his arms. 

Aredhel had stuffed his son’s head with lies and spun tales of sugar. Outside the safety of Nan Elmoth, the world ran with sorrows and oppression. All Maeglin’s sugar castles would topple. The Golodhrim would obliterate them, and Maeglin’s soft innocence with them. 

Maeglin thought they were his family, but that would only mean they could hurt him worse. Their words piercing deeper and the ground striking him back all the harder when they tossed him out like the trash. He would be nothing but another _inferior_ under their boot.

“I need…” Maeglin straightened, face picking up determination, “Father, I need to take my mother back to her family. My grandfather Fingolfin will be able to heal her.”

“No.” Eöl’s hands clamped like vices around his son’s body. He could not lose his Maeglin. “You are staying here. With me.”

Maeglin stiffened in his arms. Eöl growled, holding him even tighter. The darkness grinned at him from the shadows. “My mother needs to go home, and I am going to take her.”

“You cannot leave me!” Tighter, tighter, never let go. Wet fangs glinted in the darkness. All the stars had fallen from the sky.

“I am not leaving you, Father. I will come back. I promise.”

But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t come back. Aredhel wouldn’t let him go. She would get her people to lock Maeglin up if he tried to escape back home to Nan Elmoth. And Eöl did not have the power to pry open the fence of a Golodhrim army to free his son from their prison. 

“No, no, they will not let you go!” Eöl curved his son’s body into his, but Maeglin was not a child anymore and outclassed Eöl in strength. He twisted out of Eöl’s hold.

He held Eöl at arm’s length, face so beautiful and slipping away from Eöl’s fingers. His son. His Maeglin. “Listen to me, Father. I promise: I will come back.”

Eöl pressed his face into his son’s thigh, arms clinging to Maeglin’s waist. “You cannot leave! I will not let you go!” The darkness closed in, a whirlpool at his feet. There was no light in the world without Maeglin. Eöl could not see though all the shadows gorging themselves on his mind. He could not hear through the sound of ripping flesh and Lost ones snarling as they tore into Quendi bodies, feasting on the flesh of their own kind.

His son’s hand sunk into his hair, combing through, his other hand rubbing soothing circles over Eöl’s back. “Hush, Father, hush. I am right here.” Eöl whined and rooted closer, burying his head in Maeglin’s stomach, rubbing his cheek against Maeglin’s thigh. Maeglin petted him, and whispered promises of never leaving him into his ear until the tremors released Eöl from their maw and he lay still and quiet under his son’s soothing hands.

*

The scent of monstrous beasts slithered like snake musk into their nostrils. The shadows writhed, hissing, wrapping dark talons around the horses’ hooves. His horse reared, screaming, eyes rolling with terror. 

His mother shouted at him, her own white horse stomping its feet and tossing its head, but it had been bred in Valinor, and under the skilled hands of its mistress panic did not clamp a vice-grip about its mind. Maeglin, who had only ridden a horse when he accompanied his father on visits to the Khazâd, was not a skilled horseman, and he lost his seat when his horse reared, falling hard into the forest floor.

His horse bolted. He climbed to his feet. At least he’d not broken something. He was not giving up and conceding defeat to the forest. They would find a way out. His mother had pulled her horse around, and offered him a hand to swing up into the saddle behind her. 

He took it, but when he jumped, he ended in a sprawl in the dirt. A hand had wrapped around his ankle, anchoring him to the ground. He rolled over and looked down. A gnarled tree root fisted around his ankle. He yanked and twisted, but its grip was like being shackled by iron.

His mother swung down from her horse and drew a knife. She set upon the root, sawing and hacking. The branches of its mother tree groaned and creaked ominously. 

“Mother…”

“There!” His mother sliced through the last of the root and grabbed his hand, “Hurry! Up on Thala!”

A root shot out of the earth and smacked the horse across its rear. Thala screamed and bolted. “Thala! No!” 

Maeglin tightened his hand around his mother’s. “Come on, run!”

They ran. Roots erupted from the forest floor, grabbing at them. They dogged and leapt, tripping at times and snatching desperate, sweaty palms to help the other, yanking them to their feet and running on. They had to make it! There would be no second chances. If only his father would trust him to come home, none of this would have been necessary. But his father would never be able to see through the haze of his fear until Maeglin proved his word by returning after he’d taken his mother home.

They tore through the forest, the trees’ branches offered no shelter to escape the battlefield on the forest floor, for the branches swayed and snapped, and when low enough, lunged out to try and knock them off their feet and into the cages of roots. A stream split the land ahead. They took its bank at a leap, landing with a roll on its other side, but that brought them in close contact with the ground, and a thicket of silverthorn ate his mother’s arm, sinking their tough thorns into her skin.

She cried out, instinctively trying to tear free, but that only cut her skin open in deeper gashes. “Hold still!” Maeglin drew his knife and slashed down at the bush, slicing clean through a fistful of branches.

A root exploded out of the ground in front of him, and swatted him with the massive bat of its arm, sending him flying back though the air to land hard on his shoulder in the dirt. Before he could jump to his feet, a ribcage of roots closed over him. He fought, tearing at them. He’d lost his knife, but if he could just reach the one in his boot…

His mother screamed. His head snapped around to find her. The silverthorn had come back with a vengeance, and now coffined her body, swallowing it whole. She thrashed in the painful noose closing in around her. The thorns gashed her face; her white dress was blotted with blood.

“Mother! Cover your eyes! Your eyes! Stop fighting it!” He had to get free and save her. He threw his body against the root cage, but it was like trying to crawl his way out of a tomb of stone. 

She kept struggling and fighting, nails digging into the dirt. She’d dragged her head free, gritting her teeth against the pain of the thorns gouged into her flesh. There were tears streaking her face. His poor mother, hadn’t she suffered enough? The words torn from her throat in wet, anguished sounds made his heart weep, “Father, Father, help me! I want to go home, I want…I want…Father…please, let me go…let me _go_!”

It seemed an eternity they struggled against the indomitable force of the forest that closed in around them, its dark beauty transformed into a sinister power caging them between its teeth, locking them up in the darkness of its throat, suffocating them. He had to listen, helpless, as his mother wept, breaking there on the floor of her prison cell, with no arms but those of her thorned jailer to hold her.

Then his father was there, commanding the roots to release Maeglin, and throwing himself on Maeglin before he could pick himself up. His father’s body pressing into his pinned him back to the forest floor. His father clung to him, terror in his eyes, words grown in a bed of desperation and fear and you-can-never-leave-me! 

But his mother was still caged in thorns, _suffering_. Maeglin shoved his father off him. And spat out from the throat-full of nails he’d swallowed for every tear spilled down his mother’s bloodied, hopeless face, “I hate you! I am leaving and never coming back!”

An animal exploded into his father’s eyes, eating its way through his father’s mind and leaving only the smears of its black, bloated belly. Those animal eyes leapt on him, driving him back into the ground, a flash of steel. Maeglin cried out as his father imbedded a knife in his palm, crucifying him into the dirt.

“Eöl, no!” Breglos shouted, but too late to call back the blade.

Maeglin stared up at the dark canopy of leaves overhead. The enchantments that had awoken the forest and turned it into prison guards had slunk away, called to heel by the forest’s master, the ultimate jailer. The animal had slithered back out of his father’s eyes, licking its chops on the fat meal of violence. 

His father curled into a ball, rocking and keening, begging Maeglin to forgive him, he didn’t mean to, please, please, don’t leave me. His father’s fingers crawled over the grass and leaves towards him, but didn’t dare touch. Maeglin didn’t know what he would have done if his father flung himself on him again, wrapping him in arms like chains.

Maeglin curled his hand around the knife handle and slid it slowly out of his palm, clenching his jaw against the pain. “No, Maeglin, let me—” He shot Breglos a warning glare: stay back, don’t touch me. 

When the knife was free, he stared at the hole in his hand. His hand shook like nerve damage, like a soldier’s who’d seen too much war, like his father’s when the animal came to feast. He got to his feet.

Breglos lifted a hand towards him, “Let me wrap it for you. Maeglin…”

Maeglin walked passed him without looking. He went to his mother who neither of them had taken a moment to help, and cut her free. She trembled, blood soaking her dress, gashes tearing strips into her neck, exposed collarbone, and face. 

“Lómion,” she breathed, and took him into her arms. She ripped a clean strip from her underskirt and wrapped his hand, kissing the wound after she was done. “It will heal. You will not lose your gift. It will heal.”

With his arms around her, he lifted her to her feet. Only then did he turn and face them. His father was still lost and pleading for him. Maeglin’s throat clogged with tears, heart wrung with love. But he took in deep breaths until he could speak with a steady voice. “I want to take my mother back to her father. I understand you are afraid, Father. But I need you to trust me that when I say I will come back to you, I mean it. Will you open the forest and let us walk freely, or will you keep us against our will?”

“Maeglin,” Breglos pleaded with him, “please do not ask this of him. It is too much.”

“I am asking.” He wouldn’t if it was just about seeking the faces of his mother’s tales and a child’s daydreams. But his mother needed him to save her. He could not fail her.

Eöl made little sounds of distress, like a wounded cub. He was sorry Father, but he had to go. “I can’t, I can’t,” his father rocked, fingers reaching out to him where they crawled in the dirt. “I can’t lose you. My Maeglin. My Maeglin. Please don’t leave me.”

Maeglin shut his eyes; a tear spilled down his cheek. He was ripped in two, right down his spine. Whichever choice he made, he would hurt someone he loved. But there really wasn’t a choice, was there? His father would not let them go, and Maeglin did not have the power to untangle the net ensnaring them.

He turned around and began walking back the way they’d come, his mother’s hand clasped in his uninjured one. His mother squeezed his hand, “I love you, Lómion. I am so, so proud to call you my son.” He put his arm around her, and she laid her head on his shoulder.

His father and Breglos caught up with them sometime later, leading their escaped horses behind them. Maeglin nodded at them, but said nothing and could not bear to let his eyes linger on his father’s hunched form. His father’s eyes desperately tried to meet his, but Maeglin couldn’t. Not yet. He swung into his saddle, and followed his mother as she sent her horse breaking into a gallop, wanting to leave her captors behind.

Only after he helped his mother tend her wounds (brushing off her attempts to see to his own), and left her curled up on her bed, the heavy chains of her imprisonment and another failed escape attempt sinking her into the ocean of dreams, did he go to his father. He found him pacing in front of Maeglin’s bedroom door, a healing kit clutched to his chest like a child’s toy. He spun around at Maeglin’s approach. He stood, staring, eyes huge and desperate in his face, like a child terrified of being sent away.

Maeglin closed to him in two long strides and enfolded him in his arms. A sob tore from his father’s chest, and he flung himself around Maeglin, burrowing close. Maeglin dropped his face into his father’s neck, and held him, just held him, for a long time. 

Then he pulled back and framed his father’s face in his hands, capturing his eyes. “I love you, Father. I do. I am sorry for my words earlier. I did not mean them. I could never hate you, and I would always come home to Nan Elmoth.”

But his father did not believe he would come home, so all Maeglin could do was hold him in love and keep plans of leaving fenced behind his teeth. He would come home, and then his father would see and believe. 

He let his father lead him into his room and tend to his hand. As his father worked, falling into the role of the caregiver and parent, the frayed edges in his eyes hibernated once more, their claws retreating from their bite into his heart. By the time his father finished securing the bandages, he was himself enough to smooth his hands through Maeglin’s hair, cup the point of his chin and kiss his brow. Maeglin leaned into the touch, finding comfort and the promise of protection within it. The cling of a desperate man who’d been wounded so deeply the scars would never fade, had given way to the man who sheltered Maeglin in his strong arms.

*

Maeglin ate a solitary meal, taking it in the kitchen and not announcing his supping to his father and Breglos where the two had retreated behind their bedroom door. He used the solitude to turn his thoughts over, searching them like a river for the gleam of gold. He searched for a solution. How was he and his mother ever going to make it through the forest? By the time he retired for the night, he had unearthed no gold nugget in his mind.

It took him double the time to prepare for bed, his injured hand slowing him down. He had only just finished removing his boots and tunic when a knock rapped against his door. “Yes?”

Breglos opened the door half-way, pausing when he saw he’d caught Maeglin in the middle of changing. “May I come in?”

“A moment, let me,” Maeglin gestured to his nightshirt with his bandaged hand.

“Can I help you?”

Maeglin’s shoulders tightened. Such an offer a day ago would have curled heat low and purring in his belly. Now all he could hear was his mother’s weeping and broken voice in the thorns. “No,” he answered woodenly.

He felt Breglos’ eyes on him as Breglos hesitated in the door. Breglos’ breath loosed in a soft sigh, and he shut the door to wait patiently in the hall. Maeglin struggled out of his leggings and into the nightshirt. Then he called Breglos to enter. Breglos did, and Maeglin sat down on the edge of the bed, Breglos coming to sit beside him.

They looked at each other for a long moment. Breglos’ eyes were still green enough to dive into. He was still the most beautiful man Maeglin had ever seen, and the only one to stir desire in him. 

He’d already known Breglos had come to speak with him of his father, and he did so now, “He did not mean to hurt you.”

“I know.”

“He only wants to keep you safe. He does trust you, he does. It is the Golodhrim he does not trust. He fears they will not let you return to us, that they will hold you against your will.” Like his father was holding them?

He sighed. “I do not know how to lay his fear aside by any means but proving it false.”

“His fear does not stand on a foundation of fallacy, even if, in the end, the Golodhrim let you go.”

Maeglin looked up sharply. From his father he could understand such wild and unreasonable fears, but Breglos? “You cannot really believe they would imprison me, can you? For what reason?”

Breglos’ hand closed the distance between them and picked up Maeglin’s. Breglos’ thumb ran over the soft skin on the back of his hand. His eyes pieced with sorrow as they met his, “You have never met a Golodh besides your mother, and have been spared their cruelties. You have not seen what they have done to the Wood-elves who have no strong lord or army to punish the Golodhrim for their crimes against.”

Maeglin’s face closed, withdrawing into himself. “What are you talking about?”

Breglos said, voice soft even as it spoke of heinous deeds, “Moriquendi, they call us, all who never looked upon the _blessed_ Trees of Light. You can be sure there is no complement hidden inside. The people your mother would have you call kin use your true kin like beasts of labor. They put our people on their knees to scrub their floors and wash out their shit from the bedpans. They strip them of their dignity until some break and forget that their body is theirs and not their Golodh lord’s to do with however he chooses.”

Maeglin shook his head as the lies spilled out. No. No, the Noldor weren’t like that. Maybe some committed evil deeds, but there were Quendi like that among all kindreds. 

“You do not believe me,” Breglos did not sound surprised. “I suppose it is a similar predicament to your father’s fear that you will not return: you will not believe the truth until you see it with your own eyes.”

Maeglin stilled. Breglos’ words did not change his mind that the Noldor, or at least his family, were good people, but they did soften any last resistance against his father from his heart. His father’s fear was as ingrained in him as Maeglin’s rejection of Breglos’ words. His father could not help that he did not believe Maeglin would come home. It had nothing to do with not trusting Maeglin, and everything to do with not trusting the Noldor. 

The last pinch of resentment against his father’s arms that had felt like chains loosened. It fell away like ribbons from his chest, unbinding his heart. His heart was able to swell with a full burst of love and forgiveness for his father.

He lifted clear eyes to Breglos, running over Breglos’ face. He wanted to forgive Breglos too, and he did, but Breglos had not acted like the man he’d thought he was today. “Even if what you say it true, does that justify you acting the same?”

Breglos stiffened, “What?”

“My mother. I know she said terrible, ugly things in the past that wounded my father. But she is sick, Breglos. How can you let your hatred of the Noldor consume your compassion? I understand why my father acted as he did today. He wasn’t in his right mind. He was driven by fear. But you, Breglos? You? How could you have cared so little for another person’s suffering that you would leave her there in those thrones without a second glance? As if she was worth no more than a discarded rag?”

Breglos’ face spasmed. He turned his face away, covering his mouth with his hand in an attempt to press the choked sound back down his throat. Maeglin slid up beside him, pressing thigh-to-thigh, and wrapped his arms around Breglos. 

The pinch unraveled from his heart. Breglos was sorry. He was a good man. He had simply become lost along the way, sucked under by ugly words loosed into Eöl’s heart, watching how Aredhel had hurt the one he loved again and again until Breglos’ heart hardened and he forgot that Aredhel was sick and needed his compassion not his loathing.

Breglos turned into Maeglin’s arms, embracing him, breath trembling in Maeglin’s ear, but the wet sounds of tears passed. He whispered, “You are a good, beautiful man.” 

Maeglin’s cheeks heated. Breglos drew back until they were face-to-face. His hands slid up to hold the shape of Maeglin’s jaw. 

Maeglin swallowed. The tip of Breglos’ nose almost brushed his. Their faces were so close he could pick out all the shades of green in Breglos’ eyes. And then Breglos leaned forward and kissed him.

Maeglin’s mouth reacted on instinct, on months of repressed longing, and kissed Breglos back, opening for him. Breglos groaned at Maeglin’s response, and pressed deeper into him, hands dropping from Maeglin’s face to wrap around his waist. Maeglin looped his arms around Breglos’ neck as the passion of the kiss built. Breglos pushed him back into the bed, body coming down on top of Maeglin, hands roving over the shape of Maeglin’s back.

Maeglin broke the kiss, hands pushing Breglos away. “No, wait, I…” 

Breglos stopped, sitting back on his heels. He looked so beautiful with his cheeks tinted with the flush of desire, hair tumbled around his shoulders, and eyes smoldering as they looked at Maeglin like he was a treat Breglos was eager to savor. But Maeglin doubted, questioning where this desire came from, for Breglos had made no advances on him since the Wild Hunt. “Did you kiss me because you want to create one more reason for me not to leave Nan Elmoth?”

Breglos’ eyes wandered over Maeglin’s face, and Maeglin braced himself. “I will not deceive you.” Maeglin flinched. “No, listen,” he reached for him, taking Maeglin’s arm, pulling him closer until they knelt facing each other on the bed. “I have wanted to wander into your bed since the Wild hunt, but I did not ask to share pleasures with you because, even though you were of age, I still saw you as a child in some ways. But tonight you revealed yourself as a man in spirit as well as body, and I found myself…I simply _had_ to have you,” his voice dropped low with lust, curling in Maeglin’s toes and burning color through his cheekbones.

But, even still, even though Maeglin longed and Breglos desired, Maeglin would not. “I cannot do this to my father.”

“Oh, Maeglin,” Breglos’ fingers lifted and traced the side of Maeglin’s face, running up to learn the shape of his ear, lingering on its tip. “You are so beautiful. But you need not fear. I spoke to your father of my desire for you months ago.”

Maeglin’s mouth dropped open. “What—what did he say?”

“Ah, well…he did ask me not to approach you first. But that is done now, and he did not object. He knows I would never hurt you if I can help it.” His face solemned, and he said, softly, delicately, “You know your father is my mate. I seek no other. I cannot give you that, if that is what you are searching for. But if you desire it, I would wander into your bed.”

Maeglin nodded, “I know.” He understood and always had. Having Breglos wander to his bed was more than he’d ever hoped to receive, and his heart did not cramp for more. He did not know if he wanted more. 

He kissed Breglos, and pulled him down on the bed atop him. He spread his legs for Breglos, telling him he wanted to feel Breglos inside him this time. Breglos groaned, hips grinding into him, hand sliding down to cup the shape of Maeglin’s ass as he breathed, voice roughened with desire, “ _Yes_. I have wanted to be inside you since you drove me wild for you during the Hunt.”

Maeglin’s hips jerked. He started stripping Breglos eagerly, unable to wait to have his skin against his. Breglos laughed softly. He helped Maeglin strip him, and freed Maeglin of his nightshirt. 

They slowed to run their hands over each other’s bodies. Breglos heated Maeglin’s skin with the lust in his gaze as his eyes travelled over Maeglin’s body like claiming. Breglos pulled him into a messy kiss, and pressed him into the bed.

Feeling Breglos moving inside him, each thrust shooting pleasure up his spine, was every bit as good as slipping inside Breglos’ tightness. Maeglin couldn’t decided what he loved best about Breglos’ taking of him: the way every time their eyes met it looked like Breglos wanted to crawl deeper inside him until he’d buried his whole body in Maeglin’s, the way Breglos’ handled his body, knowing just how to touch Maeglin to have him tossing his head and crying out, back arching, or the sounds Breglos had made when he pushed inside Maeglin’s passage, the heat of his breath whispering in Maeglin’s ear, pushing Maeglin’s desire so near the breaking point he thought he’d spill himself just from those words and the fullness of Breglos spreading him open.

They lay after, sweaty and sated, Maeglin curled around the curve of Breglos’ body. Maeglin smiled a lazy, tired smile, thinking about what he’d do to Breglos next time. He made a little sound of protest when Breglos slipped from his arms, but Breglos dropped a sweet kiss into his mouth and whispered that he’d come to him tomorrow night. Then Breglos picked up his clothes and went back to Eöl. 

Maeglin lay for a moment, examining his heart. The overwhelming emotion ridding it was comfort in the knowledge that his father would not be alone in the night. Breglos would never sleep in Maeglin’s bed because Eöl needed him to keep the darkness away. Maeglin drifted into sleep with a peaceful heart.

*

In the end it was not Breglos who used their new intimacy to bind Maeglin closer to Nan Elmoth, but Maeglin who used it to brake free. It hadn’t been his intent when he started lying with Breglos, but the result of his father’s reaction to learning Breglos and Maeglin now shared a bed. The fear gripping his father by the throat loosened its hold. Maeglin twinning his body with Breglos’ was the assurance his father needed that Maeglin would not leave Nan Elmoth. It broke Maeglin’s heart, for it threw in stark relief the knowledge that his father had never believed himself enough for Maeglin to stay for.

But Maeglin would come home. His father would see. And though his father would be wracked with pain and fear for a time, Maeglin would make everything right again when he came home.

 _He is trusting you, Maeglin. Do not betray him._ Breglos’ last words to him, whispered in his ear before Breglos mounted his horse and road from Nan Elmoth with his father, haunted him. 

His father and Breglos left a handful of days ago for the Khazâd Halls to celebrate midsummer. Maeglin had gone with them every year since he was fifteen when his father took him for the first time. But he’d pulled the excuse of his mother needing him over his father’s eyes. 

Breglos’ gaze had been sharp on his face all this last week, and if Maeglin had not had the steel rod of his mother’s sickness thrust up his spine, he might have caved under that look. But his mother needed him, now more than ever. She had not had the strength to escape her dream worlds without him rousing her since her hope had been crushed in the fist of thorns. These last months had been her darkest. Despair gorged on her mind.

 _He is trusting you, Maeglin. Do not betray him._ Maeglin’s stomach tuned over with guilt like a banquet of rotten food. He would come straight home after he delivered his mother into his grandfather’s arms. He promised. Straight home.

His boots echoed eerily against the stone steps as he plunged into darkness with only the torch in his hand to light the way into his father’s vault. He smelt mold, cold stone, and earth. He reached the locked door of his father’s underground vault. His father did not horde jewels or mountains of gold on the other side, nor had he ever refused Maeglin entrance so long as he accompanied him. But inside were his father’s most prized possessions: the last of the Galvorn metal and Anguirel.

The door’s lock was fashioned from the black Galvorn metal and was unbreakable. Maeglin did not have the key. There was but one ever forged and his father wore it around his neck always.

His father had spent long hours ensuring Maeglin understood the perilous nature of the Galvorn metal, a metal that had fallen from the stars and originated from a world not their own. It wasn’t like other metals. For while Khazâd could converse with iron, steel, copper, gold, the metals of Arda, using their own magic and the skill of their fingers, it was not a true communion, not like his father had when he met the Galvorn’s awareness and had its nature revealed to him. 

The Galvorn was sentient. 

Maeglin pressed his fingers into the black lock and _reached_ with his mind. It was cold and more calculating and pitiless than any mind he’d ever touched. The black metal sang a strange song, divorced from the one that hummed in the back of his head since his birth. This one tasted of iron, the dust of stars, starvation, and a beat so jolting in its alieness Maeglin could only name it extraterrestrial. 

_Open for me, beautiful_ , he cajoled. His father said the metal demanded reverence before it would bend to any will but its own. 

An eye of black stone surveyed him, branding him with ice. There was something– 

The wiggling feeling in the back of his mind crystallized into a pair of immense, shinning fangs with a stomach of endless, never-sated hunger behind them. Maeglin _yanked_. His mind silver-fish fast, yet barely avoiding getting tapped between those snapping jaws. 

The Galvorn wanted him. It wanted to feed on him. It wanted his blood. But Maeglin’s mind was too agile for it. He side-stepped the closing jaws, and wielded his own Power like a mace, hitting the creature’s nose as it overreached, lampooning it with pain. It screamed and writhed and he _pushed_.

The door clicked open. He shoved the torch in first before slipping in behind, taking care not to brush against the black metal he could feel seething in the door.

The minute his fingers closed over the hilt of Anguirel, he felt the alien nature of the metal’s song. It was as rapacious for blood as the lock, but its voice was a slick eel in his mind, not the assault of the other. It wanted him to feed it, but it would not drink upon his blood unless he offered it. 

His father must have turned its Song in the forging. Maeglin was struck by a moment of awe for his father’s skill. How had his father mastered this metal so fully? 

His father had dominated the metal, bending it to his will. His father truly was the greatest weapon’s smith the Quendi had ever known to have accomplished this feat that left Maeglin dizzy at the mere contemplation. The fearlessness of his father’s spirit, that he would open his mind to this metal for hours on end in the forging, daring to cross minds with an alien, carnivorous consciousness even at the risk of his own mind for the sake of creation, flooded Maeglin anew with respect and awe of his father’s skill.

He snapped the black blade back into its scabbard and looped the accompanying belt about his waist, securing it with a sharp tug on the buckle. The feel of the sword on his hip was comforting, like he carried a piece of his father with him. He wasn’t stealing it. He’d bring it back soon, but he needed a sword to fight through the Valley of Dreadful Death on their way to Hithlum.

When his feet had the soft ground of earth beneath him again, he found his mother waiting for him. She had gathered their horses, tying the saddlebags on. They had packed as much food as they could carry, going light on other supplies. They did not want to waste precious time hunting. 

His mother had left everything but her weapons, and the white dress and fox-fur lined cloak she wore, behind. Maeglin had packed one spare set of clothes, and wore his favorite jet necklace, slipping in a few other pieces of small jewelry. He would come straight home, but he wanted to meet his grandfather and uncle Fingon once before her left, and when he did he wanted to wear the work of his father’s hands with pride. Everything else, though, he left in its place in his room. He would be home soon.

His mother’s horse stamped a restless circle. His mother’s face bore the signs of the darkness closing its arms around her mind, familiar as an old lover. She skin was wane, her cheeks too thin, no matter how Maeglin had pleaded with her to eat more. But her eyes shone like the light in her Fëanorion Lamp. She would be free at last, ridding again through seas of grass and a horizon so empty the sky’s belly rubbed blue and smooth against the place it met the earth.

As they drew close to Nan Elmoth’s fringes, the forest rose up to trap them, but the enchantments were weakened with the absence of their master. Maeglin used Anguirel to cut through any tree roots and brambles jumping into their path. The forest did not sprawl out at its edges, but sliced off like a cliff side. Maeglin was cocooned inside his home one moment, and spat out into the sunlight the next.

He remembered the first time he’d seen the sky clear of any enchantments, when his father had first taken him to the Khazâd’s halls. He’s slid off his horse, speechless with awe, needing to feel the familiar, stabilizing beat of the earth beneath his feet. But he was jarred out of his open-mouthed wonderment when he failed to find what he sought. In Nan Elmoth the Land was an ever-present companion looking over his shoulder, but now, here in these open plains with Nan Elmoth a dark shadow at his back, the Land was diminished. Its heartbeat so faint it took Maeglin a long, dizzying moment to place his ear against it, as if a great chasm now separated them.

He felt like a ship without its mooring, adrift at sea. “It is almost gone. The Land. It is so far away.” 

They had ridden on, and with every step they took the song of the Land grew fainter, until it had faded to a distant note. But leaving the subtle, untamed beauty of the twilight was not a wholly mournful parting. Maeglin witness his first dawn. It started with a pale blush of light, the deep blue of night blanching to a watery blue. 

As the sun crept closer to the horizon, the pale blue burnished with yellows. The sky dyed with pinks and purples until it reminded him of a field of paintbrush flowers exploding with vibrant colors. The sun came, and he had to shield his stinging eyes. But it was breathtaking even through the pain. 

His mother had tried to describe a sunrise to him a hundred times. He finally understood why she lacked the words. There were none for such glory.

Now his mother laughed at his side, arms thrown wide as if to embrace the sky as her horse ran unchecked under her clinging thighs. She wheeled her horse about. Her hair flung like a banner behind her, eyes more alive than Maeglin had ever seen them. 

“We are free, my darling!” she cried out, voice rich with laughter. “Come, home awaits us!” She set her horse flying out under her, galloping free as a ship across the waves.


	39. Chapter 34

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 34

Súlmae’s message reached Eöl and Breglos less than a day after his son’s departure from Nan Elmoth. Eöl and Breglos had taken the Khazâd-Road to Nogrod, but their pace had been a leisurely one, traveling only during those hours of night when the moon’s reign limped and the sun was many hours from rising. 

Súlmae’s message came in the form of a swift raven. Eöl had heard Aredhel speak of how the Land-stealing Celegorm could speak with beasts and birds, but it stirred no awe in him. Such a skill was not unheard of among the Free People. Breglos and his sister Súlmae knew the language of beasts and birds. They had earned the beasts’ loyalty, and used them as messengers and informants from afar.

Breglos caught the raven on his forearm. The sun was a flaming orb in the Western sky, still some hours before its setting. They had been resting beside a cool brook under the shade of a grove of slender birch trees, but even in the shade Eöl had kept his veil pulled over the upper half of his face to protect his sensitive eyes.

Breglos stroked the raven’s restless head, peering into its dark eyes. “You have the look of a heavy thought about you, beauty,” he murmured to the bird.

The bird preened into Breglos’ hand, before shaking its head, and cawing out its message. Eöl did not understand the language of birds, but Breglos’ face went rigid, and terror forked through Eöl’s chest. 

Breglos met his eyes. “Eöl,” he said carefully, voice soothing, “Maeglin and Aredhel have left Nan Elmoth. But,” he grabbed for Eöl as Eöl’s knees struck the earth, a wail ripping from his collapsing chest, “we will get him back, Eöl. We will go now, and bring him home. It is not too late!”

Eöl’s fingers scrambled at Breglos’ arm, his only anchor left in a sea of darkness. His son. His Maeglin. He couldn’t bear it. The world was ending in starfall.

He would have curled into a ball and split his _fëa_ from his _hröa_ without Breglos’ arms to catch him. There was no living past losing his Maeglin. He would have stayed with his Breglos and not left him if he had the strength, but the darkness would not be pushed back in Breglos’ arms this time. Eöl had lived beyond starfall once. He didn’t have enough left in him to survive his heart being severed from his chest a second time.

But Breglos was there passing comfort into his lips with his words, his promise: they would get Maeglin back. Eöl snatched up the hope –the belief—and used it to slice through the circling mouths wet with blood come to pull him down, down into the darkness to become one of them: a Lost one. Eöl would rip his soul out of his body before he let the darkness swallow him and he became nothing but the beast that had busied his Maeglin’s child-body, and sunk a knife through hands he had cradled.

Breglos packed up their small camp, and helped Eöl onto his horse. Eöl couldn’t stop hunching and curling around his tendered insides, trying to protect himself from the bloody mouths coming for him. They did not wait for the moon’s rising, but raced back along the Khazâd-Road. 

Súlmae had relayed the message Maeglin had left in a letter for his father: Maeglin was headed for Curufin and Celegorm’s lands that smashed against the western border of Nan Elmoth, with Amras and Amrod’s seized lands in the east. Nan Elmoth was an island between a hostel sea of Land-stealers. 

They traveled through the glare of sun and moon, though the light aggravated his eyes even with the veil’s protection. They retraced their steps, and kept to the swift road all the way to the stone bridge forging the River Celion marking the eastern line of Curufin and Celegorm’s realm. There they slowed their frantic pace, traveling warily through the hostel lands. 

Curufin and Celegorm had built themselves a fortress in the Pass of Aglon in the northern most stretch of their lands, and Breglos said they might pass unnoted for some time through the patchwork of crudely cultivated Golodhrim fields and shrewd Wood-elf ones, perhaps even waylaying Maeglin before he reached the Fëanorions’ stronghold. But if Maeglin gained the high walls of the fortress, Eöl would go in after his son, even if it meant capture and being thrown down bound before the Fëanorions. 

Eöl and Breglos set up camp. They would press on in a few hours, after the horses rested. Breglos told him to lie down and seek sleep while he scouted, but sleep only meant nightmares. Even Breglos’ arms could not drive them off. Nothing could ease this terror and suffocating grief until he had his son back.

Morfin nosed his hand, rooting around in his palm, and Thinfin pressed against Eöl’s back. Two heavy bodies cocooned him, one on either side. Their fur was soft and warm, and he could feel the rise and fall of their ribcages, quicker than a human’s breathing.

A shift in the wind, a creaking tree limb, and the exhale of soft breaths were all the warning Eöl had. They were enough to give him time to put a javelin in his hands and gain his feet with Thinfin and Morfin snarling at his side, three pairs of shinning eyes picking apart the shadows between trees. 

There, a deeper shadow between shadows, the flash of a Golodh’s glossy black hair, and the glint of a sword pulled from its scabbard. Eöl loosed his javelin. It would have sunk into the tree above the Golodh’s head, a warning shot, but an arrow sunk its head into the javelin’s arm at the last second, spinning the long dart off course.

A Wood-Elf stepped out of the shadows. Eöl’s eyes swept over sparrow-brown skin and a head of hair that should have been tied high and proud in a warrior’s tail of honor, but instead was bound in the intricate braids of the Golodhrim. This one had abandoned his people to get into bed with the oppressors of his kin. 

Eöl met the Wood-elf’s eyes. No shame, no remorse. Perhaps this one had been bred by the Golodhrim, trained from birth to roll over at their whistle. 

The Wood-elf had strung another arrow quick as a blink after loosing the first, and had it drawn on Eöl. The Golodhrim closed a circle around him. The Galvorn armor sung o him, urging him to lean on its strength and smear it with the faces of bloodied Golodhrim. Eöl shut his mind to it.

“Call your beasts off, or see them slain,” one of the advancing Golodhrim threatened. Thinfin and Morfin would die for him, but they would be pointless deaths. He had an errand for them besides. He sung three notes in the Star Tongue, and sent them off to find Breglos. “Now on the ground.”

His hands clenched into fists. (They had been shaking like the earth in a quake’s aftershocks.) Breglos would be here soon. They would get his Maeglin back. Breglos had promised. Eöl had to hold on; Breglos would be here soon.

He dropped to his knees.

(A knife cutting him open, again, and again, and again, hands slicked with his blood sinking into his chest, pawing over his organs, rooting around inside him to _see how he worked_. Eyes malicious enough to eat a whole Planet raw, raven laughter as he begged, please, no more, why are you doing this to us? A cold so deep his soul shivered, and a mind from which evil itself had birthed raped his own in vicious, rending thrusts.) 

“You seem to be headed in the wrong direction, Eöl of Nan Elmoth,” the Golodh pressed steel against his neck, letting the sword bite flesh, a few drops of Moriquende blood sliding down the steel. “And that attempt on my man’s life is a long way from fostering my trust. Tell me your business here?”

He did not answer. His stomach felt like it was trying to claw its way out his backbone. The tremors had worked their way up his arms to his shoulders, belly clenching and clenching like a fist. 

“Very well. Bind his hands.”

No, please, please, no. 

They yanked his hands behind his back. He cried out, twisting, and struggling against them until the point of the sword pressed into his jugular and he froze like a rabbit caught inside a wolf’s gaze. “Your resistance does not reflect well on your purpose here, Eöl of Nan Elmoth.” 

His mind shut down, blanked, survival instinct usurping the terror. He lay limp as the dead as they bound him.

“What business do you have sulking about my lords’ lands?”

Mind wiped clean as a sheet of ice. Head bowed, submissive, if he was very good, they would take the pain away after they cut him open, stuffing his insides back in and sealing up the places the knife had cut with surgical precision. ( _Why?_ the voice of Evil spoke. Eöl whimpered under its crush. It was a landslide pouring over his head, boulders grinding him into the dust, _Because it amuses me_.) 

One of the Golodh sunk a boot in Eöl’s ribs, “Answer when you are spoken to!” But the Galvorn metal easily turned the strike aside so it did not even pull a hiss from Eöl’s lips.

“Strip him of his amour.”

He would have snarled, lashing out at the Golodhrim who dared lay hands on what his own had fashioned from a fallen sky-rock with the sweat of his brow and the cunning of his mind after enduring burns and an aching body from a labor that was both dangerous and long. But that was before starfall, when he was Eöl, Lord of Nan Elmoth, not now, when he was Eöl without his Maeglin. He was no one but a shell stuffed with nightmares.

They stole his armor from him like the thieves they were. He lay vulnerable on the belly of the Land, his hidden javelins discovered and taken gleefully from him as well. The Song’s melody hummed against his chest, but the Land would lend him no Power. Not without the proper sacrifices given.

Where was his Breglos? It was so dark. The blood-wet mouths were coming for him. Where was his Breglos?

He was yanked to his knees. “I will ask you one more time. What business do you have in my lords’ lands?”

Evil had liked him quiet and submissive. If he was very good, Evil would take the pain away after. But these wanted him to pry his mouth open. He needed to be good. If he was very good, they would stuff him back together like their doll before they locked him in the cold pit of blackness and blood-wet mouths.

“I sought your lord’s halls; my business is with him.” 

The leader’s pitiless eyes sunk into his face, trying to unpick a lie. He gestured, motioning for his warriors to pull Eöl up. “You shall meet my Lord Curufin, as you claim is your wish, and he shall judge the truth for your words.”

They took him, slung like a sack of goods over the front of their mounts, hands and feet bound, to their lord. It was not to the Pass of Aglon they rode, but the Fords of Aros in the west of Curufin and Celegorm’s lands. 

The Golodhrim warriors untied Eöl from the horse and dragged him into Curufin’s tent to be shoved onto his knees. Curufin’s eyes were as cold and clear a grey as a winter’s dawn as they surveyed Eöl, bound at his feet. 

“What errand have you in my lands? An urgent matter, perhaps, that keeps one so sun-shy abroad by day?” 

The darkness circled, and the binds about his wrists threatened to buckle his mind, but Breglos was here. Eöl was not alone. 

A wren had landed on his shoulder when the Golodhrim tossed him into the dirt while they took their rest beside a stream. The wren chirped in his ear, hopping on his shoulder, then down to his hands. It pecked at the ropes binding him, letting out a sorrowful warble. It looked at him with eyes too keen for a bird’s. Breglos looked out of them. 

Breglos had stayed with him, rubbing his soft breast against Eöl’s cheek, preening Eöl’s hair with his beak. And when the Golodhrim came to drag him up and throw him back over a horse, Breglos’ little body slipped down the neck of Eöl’s tunic and huddled against him, tinny heartbeat thumping in his ear. Even now Breglos’ thin toes clung to the back of Eöl’s tunic where Breglos hid under the fall of Eöl’s hair.

Breglos rubbed his feathered head against the back of Eöl’s neck, and Eöl found the strength to answer in a voice that did not betray how close he teetered to the edge: “I have learned that my son and Aredhel have ridden to visit you while I was from home; and it seemed to me fitting that I should join them on this errand.”

Curufin laughed in Eöl’s face, his dark, shinning hair swinging as he tossed it out of his eyes. “They might have found their welcome here less warm than they hoped, had you accompanied them; but it is no matter, for that was not their errand. It is not two days since they passed over the Arossiach, and thence rode swiftly westward. It seems that you would deceive me; unless indeed you yourself have been deceived.” 

Falling, falling, darkness sinking its fangs in, lost, lost—Breglos’ beak pecked into his neck, a sting of pain that grounded him. Breglos was here. His Maeglin was not locked behind the high fortress walls of a Golodhrim keep. Eöl would find him and bring him home. “Then, lord, perhaps you will give me leave to go, and discover the truth of this matter.”

“You have my leave,” Curufin said with a dismissive wave of his hand, sending Eöl from his presence like a dog, “the sooner you depart from my lands the better will it please me.”

They tossed him his armor and weapons, not caring if they fell in the dirt at his feet, and called his horse, as ready to be rid of him as he was to be gone. His weapons and amour coffined off some of the terrible vulnerability into the dark corner of his mind.

But before he could away, Curufin wound his hand in the horse’s mane. A cloud passed over Curufin’s face, and the distant piercing of a note in the Great Song echoed in Eöl’s ears. Curufin said, voice grave, “This counsel I add: return now to your dwelling in the darkness of Nan Elmoth; for my heart warns me that if you now peruse those who love you no more, never will you return thither.”

_love you no more_

_love you no more_

_love you no more_

Eöl cried out, and sent his horse into a gallop, flying from that place. 

_love you no more_

_love you no more_

_love you no more_

Maeglin! Please, no, please, his son, his star, his Maeglin! He must find him, and hold him, and make him love him again. He could not bear—he could not—there were no stars left in the sky if his Maeglin slipped through his fingers and went out.

He sent his horse careening towards the Fords of Aros. As he broke free of the Fëanorions’ camp, two shadows came to follow at his heels: Thinfin and Morfin. And perched on Morfin’s back was a sparrow. A rolled scrap of parchment had been tied to its leg. Eöl would have flown on, eyes wild, but Breglos tapped his beak against his neck. Eöl slowed his horse into a canter, holding out his arm for the sparrow to flutter up. 

He unrolled the parchment and read the Cirth. The Golodhrim had caught Breglos’ scent, and chased him away when he tried to follow Eöl when he was captured. But Breglos had eluded them now, and was on his way back to Eöl. Breglos wanted him to wait for him at the Fords. 

Eöl tucked the message against his heart, and set his face west to the Fords. Breglos said he was a day’s ride behind. If Eöl did not fly, he would lose his Maeglin. He could not wait.

*

A scorpion had loosed in his brain and tore at it with pinchers and a giant stinger. There was nothing but terror and screaming in his head. The light of his Breglos had faded from the wren’s eyes, and it fluttered away from the cup of his palm. Breglos could not hold the enchantment indefinitely; it had loosened, and then unraveled.

Eöl was alone and lost, lost in the darkness. Nothing was left of Eöl but the arrowhead pointing to the falling star of his Maeglin. He had to reach his Maeglin before the star crashed into the earth and went out.

_love you no more_

Eöl knew no rest. He rode until his horse panted, lather formed over its coat. Then he ran, the horse keeping pace beside him. Then he rode. Then he ran. Then he rode. Then he ran.

_love you no more_

Exhaustion dragged him under, and he’d slip into nightmares as he rode. He did not stop to eat or wash or hide from the burning light of the sun blistering his sensitive eyes. Thinfin and Morfin brought him hares and other small creatures their jaws snapped up. Eöl’s teeth tore into the raw, bloody flesh, tearing strips out. His mouth was wet with blood, his teeth and chin stained with it. It crusted under his nails (Did they look a little sharper? More claw-like? More Lost?).

Her was lost in the Dark, lost, lost, lost. His Maeglin had left him. His Maeglin loved him no more.

*

His mother caught sight of his father first. The land rolled through gorged, rocky river beds, and humps of grassland. She glimpsed the black dot of his father when his father crested one of the hills in the land, exposing himself.

Her hands started shaking. Maeglin took them in his, and promised that they would press on harder, no rest, or find a place to conceal themselves until his father had passed them by, losing their trail. They were so close now, the worst of it behind them after they broke through the Valley of Dreadful Death, and yet so far. 

But his mother shook her head, mouth pressed tight to stop its trembling. “No,” she said, “we will not even make the refuge of Tol Sirion before he catches us. I cannot go back there. I _can’t._ ”

He rubbed her arm, and whispered promises of keeping her safe, keep her _free_. He said, “If my father catches us, you ride on, and I will speak with him. This is not Nan Elmoth, Mother. The land will not imprison you.”

“No!” she clasped his hands tight, “I cannot lose you!” 

She would lose him when he went home, but he held his tongue. He had told her he would return to Nan Elmoth after he took her home. She hadn’t wanted to listen though. She would do everything she could to tempt him to stay by her side, and it would be a great temptation, but he was more Maeglin Starchild than Lómion Finwëion. He belonged with his father and the Free People.

His mother said, desperation layered thick over the words, “The entrance to Gondolin is close. We must hide there for a time, until Eöl has lost our trail, then we can carry on to Hithlum.”

Maeglin frowned. “Did you not tell me that that city is secret and my uncle has lain down laws to prevent any from leaving with the knowledge of its location in their minds?”

“That it true, but I am Turgon’s sister, and you my son, such laws do not apply to kin. My aunt Irimë and I rode freely from Gondolin’s gates before, you and I shall do so again.”

Maeglin trusted his mother, and so she led him to the secret path into Gondolin. Before they breached the Hidden Way, she cautioned him to speak nothing of his father. _Why?_ he asked. The look she turned on him was long, her brow creased. Almost he reached out to skim her mind, but she would feel his penetration at once. At last she said, _Trust me, Lómion, it is better this way._ He did trust her, but his heart tolled a note of disquiet that she would not answer. 

*

Light, gold, white, these were the strongest impressions in Maeglin’s mind as the guards led him into his uncle’s halls. The ceiling seemed to go on for miles, arching into a high point that was not so much domed as it was flowered. White marble bloomed across the soaring ceiling like an opening flower, each petal a carved masterpiece in itself. The walls, the marble arches, the floor, everything was covered in intricate designs of flowers and stars, and gold leafing seemed to have been layered over every available surface. Under his feet were mosaics. And the walls were painted murals. Scenes of Trees of Light, and a remembered land fairer than anything Maeglin’s imaginative mind could have spun from his mother’s tales: Aman.

The lords and ladies of Gondolin observed their approach, bedecked in jewels, velvet, and a rainbow of silks. If his mother felt shame in the white dress patched in places and frayed at the hem, she did not show it. Her head was high and proud, and her grip on his arm assured as she walked like a white swan to her brother’s enthroned form.

As for Maeglin, he understood a kernel of his mother’s words now when she’d told him all he possessed in Nan Elmoth would be deemed nothing once he walked among the Noldor. But he was not left gaping open-mouthed or resentful of the subtler, wild beauty he had been cradled and raised in. 

He looked upon the jewels and dress these Noldor had bathed themselves in, and found little to his taste. It was too gaudy, too opulent. And while Turgon’s hall were grand, so too had been the halls of the Khazâd. Maeglin found he preferred the Khazâd’s mountain halls, for though they glowed with lamps and glittering jewels, their light did not irritate his eyes as the sunlight spearing in through the high windows and reflecting off the excessive gold leafing as this hall did.

He did wish he had had the time to prepare himself properly, and arrange the peerless work of his father’s hands on his body, but his mother and he had been too pressed for time for such a triviality. So he wore now the same tunic he’d been wearing for days, and only his jet necklace, cut amethyst studs in his ears, and his rings adorned him. But he wore not a stitch of shame alongside them. He was proud of his heritage, and to claim Eöl Starborn as his father.

“Joyous indeed is this day that brings one I had thought lost back into my city,” Turgon greeted Aredhel, rising from his throne, the stern mold of his face broken with a welcoming smile. 

His mother ascended the dais to her brother’s side. She embraced Turgon, holding him close and throwing her head back in a laugh like victory and the sun’s radiance. “Brother! Too long have been the years since I last looked upon your face,” Aredhel kissed Turgon’s cheek, and then turned to the tall female who seemed spun from gold on her brother’s right. “Idril! My little niece,” she took the willowy form of Idril into her arms as well, and Maeglin thought she would have spun Idril around if the lady would have allowed it. 

His mother should have always laughed like this.

“And who is this that accompanies you, Sister?” Turgon asked, calling attention back to Maeglin who stood silent before the throne. 

His mother’s eyes flashed with pride as she called Maeglin forward. She placed her hand on his shoulder, pulling him to her side, and a murmur swept through the gathered Noldor as they looked upon the two of them side-by-side. “This is my son, Maeglin.”

“Your son?” Turgon looked long upon Maeglin. “I see the blood of Finwë is strong in him. A powerful prince I perceive he will be one day. A worthy and valuable asset to our city.”

Maeglin wasn’t sure how he should respond to being appraised and judged like a racing horse by a potential bidder. ‘A valuable asset?’ His mother’s grip on his shoulder turned sharp, though that could have been as much in warning as anger at her brother’s words.

“I rejoice indeed that Ar-Feiniel has returned to Gondolin,” Turgon said. “And now more fair again shall my city seem then in the days when I deemed her lost. And Maeglin shall have the highest honor in my realm.” 

Maeglin’s chest loosened. Breglos had been wrong. There was no oppression awaiting him here, no slave collar slipping about his neck. 

“Now,” Turgon said, clapping his hands, “We shall have feasting and revelry this night, for one I had thought lost has returned!” 

Long tables were pulled out by plainly dressed Quendi. Their bodies were slim like beech trees, lean muscled and small next to height of the Aman-born Noldor. Most had skin in shades of brown, none had the Tree Light in their eyes, and all had ugly iron hoops in their ears. They bustled about setting the tables and bringing in heavy dishes laden with food and pitchers of wine –and not meeting the Noldor’s eyes. Maeglin’s stomach clenched. 

( _The people your mother would have you call kin use your true kin like beasts of labor. They put our people on their knees to scrub their floors and wash out their shit from the bedpans._ )

No. It could not be. Not here in the king’s hall. Because if it was _here_ , then…then it was everywhere. But no. No. There was some mistake. Even though all the servants in the hall were Wood-elves, that did not mean Breglos’ words were true when he spoke of heinous oppression.

His mother led him by the arm to the seat prepared for him at the High Table. She took the seat of honor on Turgon’s right, and Maeglin sat on his uncle’s left, his cousin Idril on his right. He was surrounded by the apex of Gondolin’s nobility, and longing for home stabbed him. He wanted to curl into his father’s arms under the cool twilight of their home, listen to the birds singing in the forest, Thinfin and Morfin playing by the hearth, with Breglos spooned up behind him, molding to the shape of his body with the promise of pleasures between them. He wanted to be Maeglin Starchild. But here he was Lómion, Prince of the Noldor. He gathered his pride in both his names and the nervous thrill of wearing this side of himself openly where once only his mother had seen, and stuck a rod in his spine.

He watched the other lords from under his lashes, doing as they did, picking out the utensils they chose and filling his goblet with the same wines. He could not identify half the delicacies offered him, but he refused to let his ignorance show. 

“How do you find Gondolin, Cousin?” Maeglin turned at Idril’s words. Her eyes were the exact shade of blue the sky had been the first time he’d seen a sunrise. 

“It is…different…Cousin,” he stumbled over the unfamiliar claiming of blood.

She smiled, it was not his mother’s glowing smiles or soft ones when she looked at him, but the smile was not chill with winter either. “Come, you must tell me of yourself. Where were you born, and who is the lucky man who won my aunt’s unconquerable heart?”

“There is little to tell.” Little he wanted to tell. Nan Elmoth was _his_. It belonged tucked between the shadows of his ribcage, not fondled over in this stinging light and gaudy hall. As diversion he asked, “What is this about my mother being unconquerable?”

“Oh,” Idril flicked her fingers, “it is nothing now. When she was younger many sought your mother’s favor, but none could ever win her love. Not even,” her voice dropped and she leaned towards him to whisper for his ears alone, “Celegorm, son of Fëanor. Though it was said he was madly in love with her.”

His mother had never told him of this in all her tales of hunting with her favorite cousin. “Celegorm Fëanorion loved my mother?”

“Shh,” she shushed him, though his voice was soft-spoken. They both cast a glance at Turgon and Aredhel who were engrossed in the other’s company. “We do not speak freely of the Fëanorions here,” Idril cautioned. “Perhaps I should not have mentioned it, but I thought surely my aunt would have said. In fact,” she shot him a glance, “I thought when she announced you her son without naming your father that Celegorm was your sire.”

The breath caught on the shock of realization in Maeglin’s lungs. He didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it before, only that he had lived so long with everyone around him already knowing his heritage it hadn’t occurred to him that the Elves of Gondolin wouldn’t see his father in his blood. His mixed-blood had been a defining element of his life; it seemed unbelievable that anyone could not determine his heritage with a single glance. 

The true reason his mother had advised him to say nothing of Eöl hit him with a punch in the gut. It wasn’t tales of his father, Lord of Nan Elmoth, she feared, but the claiming of blood. All these Elves who looked upon him with curiosity but no disgust, his uncle who had declared him welcome and honored, they all believed him a Noldo. Full-blooded. 

He felt sick. He looked down at the lavish banquet prepared by Wood-elves’ hands and wanted to regurgitate every bite-full. ( _They strip them of their dignity, until some break and forget that their body is theirs and not their Golodh lord’s to do with however he chooses._ )

The walls closed in around him. Gaudily bedecked faces stretched cheap, flaking smiles over the maggots crawling under their skin. He had to _get out_!

He swallowed through the bile, and set his fork down with hands that betrayed him in their trembling. He folded them in his lap and wiped his face clean of the horror cracking through. He had to get out of here, and to do that he needed to keep his mouth shut and pretend he was no one but Lómion Finwëion, a bastard son, but one planted in his mother by a Noldo. He would keep pretending until his mother and him escaped through the Hidden Way and left this corpse city behind.

“Cousin?”

He turned to Idril who waited for his reply. He was Lómion Finwëion, bastard Noldo child. “No, Celegorm is not my father, but my mother speaks highly of the Fëanorions. I wonder she did not love him in return.”

“Well,” she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It was for the best, given the closeness of blood which caused the whole thing to be hushed up. The Eldar do not join with those so close in blood, according to the Valar’s laws. And here, in Gondolin, those are still honored.”

Maeglin had thought nothing of the closeness of blood. His mother had never cared to waste both their times instructing him on the Valar’s laws nor the Noldor’s, and he had been too interested in other things to ask after them. So he was left like a blinded baby in their conversation, ignorant of even the least of these laws Idril spoke of in a carefully neutral voice. 

His mother’s voice, infused with pride, snatched his attention. She spoke to Turgon, and more than a few others tilted their ears in to hear. “…my son saved me. It was no easy fight, for the Dark Elf had poisoned the forest with Black Magic until all was shadows and cages, seeking to bind us there. But my son is a great warrior of our people, and together, we fought our way out of the Dark Elf’s enchantments and back into the light.”

What? No. His father...Nan Elmoth...how could she reduce it to a prison cell, and his father to the villain in her tale? She had no right to strip it of its beauty and his father of his humanity. His father was beautiful inside. He couldn’t help it that a parasite festered in his brain. He was _sick_. He needed love, Maeglin’s love, not this vilifying, these words painting him a monster spilling out of his mother’s mouth. 

Why was she doing this? Why would she say these things, and to _them_? To these Quendi with maggots crawling under their skin? 

Everything was spirally out of control. The lords and ladies at the High Table gobbled up his mother’s words, a feast aligning with perfection in their crooked hearts. Murmurs of ‘Moriquende’ passed from mouth to mouth with sneers, and _what else could you except from savages?_ Maeglin sat, back rigid as the mummers crashed over him, dousing him with slime. He was a coiled spring, vibrating with tension.

At that moment the doors of the Great Hall were thrown open as guards bearing shields with the crest of a gold harp hurried in, putting a jarring halt to the celebrations. 

Turgon rose from his seat, face stern. “What brings warriors of the House of the Harp into my Halls?”

“Lord!” cried one of the guards, falling to his knees before his king. “The Guard have taken captive one who came by stealth to the Hidden Gate. Eöl he names himself, and he is dark and grim, of the kindred of the Moriquendi; yet he claims the Lady Aredhel’s son is his son, and demands to be brought before you. His wrath is great and he is hard to restrain; but we have not slain him as your law commands.”

His mother’s face blanched. Her eyes stuck fast on Maeglin’s, all the light that had sent her tongue running with the heady drunkenness of freedom had been knocked out of them. She stood, taking Turgon’s arm, “Eöl has followed us, even as I feared. But with great stealth was it done; for we saw and heard no pursuit as we entered the Hidden Way.” She cast Maeglin a look that begged for forgiveness, etched with regret for the words she had loosed so freely before but would now haunt them. She turned to the guard, “He speaks the truth. He is Eöl, and he is the father of my son. Slay him not, but lead him here, if the king so wills.”

Turgon willed it, but after the guard had left on his erred, the Hall was stifled in silence. Turgon did not look at his sister; his hands clenched knuckle-white around the arms of his chair. With a subtle motion, his mother called Maeglin to her side. “Stay close, my son,” she whispered in his ear, “and say nothing. Eöl will behave as Eöl behaves, but I will speak to my brother in private after and will handle this mess. Trust me, Maeglin,” her hand tightened on his arm, “ _Trust me._ I will take care of it, and we will leave this place, just as I promised.”

Maeglin put his hand over his mother’s, a silent touch of trust. He had no other choice now. He would trust her to bring her promises home to roost, for he could not hope his father would charm the Noldor into releasing him. If only Turgon had called for Eöl to be brought before him in private though, and not this _spectral_. But his mother would save them. She had to.

Maeglin clipped a blank mask over his face as the many pairs of eyes burned into it. They knew now. The lies had been stripped away and they knew the blood of the Free People filled his veins alongside the Noldor. 

He held his head high. He was Maeglin Lómion. He was not ashamed. It was they who should be struck through the heart with shame. 

When they brought his father in, Maeglin gasped, like a blow to the stomach, knocking all the air from his lungs. Dried blood circled his father’s mouth, smeared down his chin. He was caked in mud, hair a matted mess of twigs and leaves, looking like he’d rolled around on a forest floor, but the worst, the worst was his eyes. Wild and lost. What had Maeglin done? Regret slammed into him with the rage of a charging bull, its horns gorging him. Why had he ever left? 

Those eyes punched into his. Maeglin tried to pour all his love out through his eyes. _I love you. I didn’t leave you, I promise. We will be home soon._ But his father’s eyes burned into his face, scrambling and scratching at him like Maeglin had his hands around his father’s neck and was strangling him to death.

Maeglin would have thrown aside his mother’s counsel then, and run to his father, sweeping him up into his arms and kissing his face until his father understood Maeglin _loved him_. But his mother’s fingers dug into his arm, sinking the anchor of escape into his mind. He had to hold his tongue and let his mother handle this. He couldn’t bear it if it was his own actions that trapped the three of them here forever. What would his father do without his Breglos? Or Nan Elmoth’s soft, dusky arms to cradle him? His father would find no peace in this city of corpses and stinging light.

Turgon stood from his throne, and though he approached Eöl as if he would take his hand and welcome him, Maeglin saw the coldness in his eyes and knew he no more wanted his father in his kingdom than an Orc. Turgon was the king of the corpse city. “Welcome, kinsman, for so I hold you,” Turgon said falsely. “Here you shall dwell at your pleasure, save only that you must abide and depart not from my kingdom for it is my law that none who finds the way hither shall depart.”

“I acknowledge not your law,” Eöl growled, the edges of a beast in his voice (no, please, not _now_ ; they could not afford for the animal to unleash in his father’s eyes _now_ ). “No right have you or any of your kin in this land to seize realms or to set bounds, either here or there. This is the land of the Teleri kindreds, to which you deal ever proudly and unjustly. I care nothing for your secrets and I came not to spy upon you, but to claim my own: my son. My son you shall not withhold from me. Come, Maeglin son of Eöl! Your father calls you. Leave the house of his enemies and return home with him!”

His mother’s fingers sunk into his arm. Turgon’s heavy gaze bored into the side of his face. His father had flung out a hand to him, calling him, _needing_ him. Maeglin could not bear it. He must go to his father. He must kiss all the shattered glass out of his father’s eyes. He must—

Turgon’s voice boomed loud and grave like the spell of doom: “I will not debate with you, Dark Elf. By the swords of the Noldor alone are your sunless woods defended. Your freedom to wander there wild you owe to my kin; and but for them long since you would have labored in thralldom in the pits of Angband.” 

The parasite gnawed its way through the starlight memories and the love stitching their silver thread through his father’s mind, holding it together in a tapestry of beauty whose light had cradled Maeglin in love. The stitches holding the darkness back were unraveling. The darkness geminated inside his father’s mind, swelling up, bulging against the stitches, popping them one by one.

“Here I am king,” Turgon continued, ruthless as a blade. “And whether you will it or not, my doom is law. This choice only is given you: to abide here, or die here; and so also for your son.” He slid the last like a dagger between Maeglin’s ribs. His mother’s hand convulsed on his. Turgon’s false smile of welcome had been as thin as the Noldo-blood in Maeglin’s veins. 

Maeglin’s heart stopped like a rock in his chest, and dropped, plunging into his stomach. His father would never consent to being imprisoned. 

His father’s eyes had hardly flickered from his face since his father had been dumped before Turgon’s throne. Maeglin did now what he should have done the moment he saw the evidence of his father’s suffering smeared over his father’s face in blood, never mind that his father had asked him long ago never to jump into his mind for his father never wanted the darkness preying upon him to spill into Maeglin’s. 

Maeglin leapt, plunging into his father’s mind. He fell into a battlefield of nightmares, splattered blood everywhere, chucks of memories torn out like flesh from a body, and the animal revealed, caught red-handed at murder: a scorpion, black scales slithering with malice, its tail striking again, and again, and again, into the vulnerable tissue of his father’s mind, like a snake’s fangs bringing down its prey. The black eyes of an insect swallowing all the light, grotesque blubs dripping darkness, honed in on Maeglin like a shark scenting blood in the water, its next meal.

Maeglin shaped himself into a spear-point of cold, sharp starlight, and hurled himself at the monster ravaging his father. _You will not have him!_ He slammed into the darkness, piecing it with a blade of Light. It _screamed_ , writhing, wounded. Maeglin could save—

Screams, a body collapsed against his chest. His arms caught it with instinct. His mother. Her head fell against his shoulder, face ashen, but eyes finding his washed with relief: she had saved him. One of his father’s javelins protruded from her shoulder. No. 

But it was not life-threatening. It would be alright, everything could still go back to the way it had been. It was like the time his father had backhanded him, or thrown him against the wall, or buried a knife in his palm. It was an accident. It was the animal, the scorpion, the parasite that had latched on in black pits of horror that made his father’s mind sick, but not his heart. His father never meant to hurt anyone. It was the animal behind his eyes that did the hurting, not his father.

He looked up, seeking his father’s eyes, but his father had been bowled over by a mob of guards. They tied his hands and legs, even gagging his mouth in their fury. No, wait! His father’s eyes rolled with terror. They were dragging his father away before Maeglin could run to him and take him in his arms and tell him he loved him, he forgave him. Wait!

Turgon snatched his mother from Maeglin’s hold, swinging her up into his arms, shouting for a healer. Maeglin was torn in two, right down his backbone. But Turgon would see to his mother, and Maeglin would be at her bedside in a moment, just a moment, he needed a moment. 

He shoved through the crowd separating him from his father. They had dragged his father out the hall doors. Maeglin had lost sight of him. Wait! 

He pushed his way blindly through the crowd, earning angry shouts at his back, none of that mattered. He burst out of the hall, head whipping between the corridors, seeking a clue to which way the guards had gone. There was none. 

He chose a corridor and sprinted down it. He’d chosen the wrong one. He ran back, chose its opposite. He ran through one decadent hall after the next, through flower gardens, and chambers reserved for the business of rule. He stumbled into a wing with bedrooms, backtracked, searched on, seeking the lower levels. 

He was still searching this palace that closed in like a prison cell, like the expanse of a sea sundering him from his father’s arms, when guards tracked him down. They told him he was called to his mother’s side. _Where have they taken my father?_ he asked. One of the guards put a heavy hand on his shoulder, _The prisoner is none of your concern. The king will decide his fate. Come, the king has called for your presence._

Maeglin let them lead him away, snatching his hope to his chest so it could not dissolved like sandcastles in the tide: his mother and he would speak to Turgon. They would make him understand. It had been an accident. His father hadn’t meant to hurt anyone. And then his mother would do as she promised and take them swiftly from this city of corpses.


	40. Chapter 35

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 35

The healer had finished dressing his mother’s wound when Maeglin arrived. Turgon sat at her bedside, hands folded in his lap. His mother argued with the healer to stop fussing, she was well enough to sit up.

Her eyes went to him the moment he slipped into the room. “Lómion,” she held out her hand to him, naming him her child of twilight now the truth had been left splattered like blood across the stones of the hall. 

He took her hand, sinking down into the bed beside her. He tucked stray strands of hair behind her ears, “How are you feeling, Mother?” He felt Turgon’s eyes on his nape. 

She waved him off, “Never mind this. It is nothing. I will be up on my feet tomorrow, wait and see.”

He smiled, squeezing her hand, “I know.” It was not frailness of body that kept her pinned to the bed for years. Assured his mother was well in spirit and would soon be in body, he turned to meet Turgon’s heavy gaze. “Lord, I must speak to you of my father.” 

Turgon’s jaw clenched. His mother’s grip tightened on his hand, “My son is not his father, Brother. Lómion possesses a noble spirit. It was he who saved me from Eöl. Without him, I would never have made it home to you. You must not pile any blame on his head. He is innocent, wholly innocent of his father’s sins.”

“My father did not mean to inflict harm! He is a good man, but he was hurt—”

“Quiet, Lómion,” his mother’s voice carried a warning. Maeglin looked into Turgon’s face and found only barren cliffs, stripped of compassion. But Maeglin could not stop, he must—

His mother pulled him close and pressed her mouth to his ear, whispering, “Not now. Wait. Trust me to know my brother’s heart and moods. We must wait.”

Waiting went down like a stone through his throat. His father needed him _now_. But if pressing now roused Turgon’s wrath, then he risked trampling over the careful tending his mother’s persuasive words could have harvested from the rocky soil of Turgon’s heart. He must bite his tongue and have patience, even though the thought of his father’s suffering, locked away alone in some room (please not a cell) burnt holes in the bottom of his tongue. 

Turgon stood, towering over them, and bent to brush a kiss into Aredhel’s cheek. “It is good to have you home, Sister. I will leave you to rest now.” He straightened and flicked his fingers at Maeglin, shooing him like a master his hound, “Leave her to rest.”

His mother’s hand clasped his close. “No, Turgon. I want my son with me.”

Turgon frowned, but did not overrule her desire. He strode for the door, back straight and body tall. Maeglin did not watch him with anything like awe. His uncle had proved nothing like the man featured in his mother’s stories. Had everything been a lie? What were Fingon and Fingolfin _really_ like? And was Hithlum another city built on the backs of Wood-elves treated like dirt?

With Turgon’s vacating of the room, a tension built in Maeglin. His mother let out a sigh and lifted his hand to her lips, kissing its back. “Forgive me. I should never have brought us here.”

“Everything will work out, Mother. You can speak with Turgon, and my father will not be harmed. You know it was an accident, don’t you?” his eyes flickered between hers.

She gave him a wane smile. “I will speak with my brother, and we will leave this place and go to my father.” She touched his cheek, “Hithlum is not like Gondolin. When I spoke of the Noldor I was speaking of my father’s people. You will see, Lómion, they are noble and fierce protectors. And my father the best of them all. It will be different when we reach my father.”

“But you know my father did not mean to hurt you, don’t you?” he pressed. It felt like a hook pulled all his insides up through his throat. She wouldn’t let his father be harmed, surely. His mother wasn’t like that. Even if she resented Eöl for caging her in Nan Elmoth against her will, she wouldn’t turn her face from Eöl and let Turgon kill him. Not his mother.

“I know you love him, so I will speak to Turgon on his behalf.”

Maeglin exhaled. The hook loosed its jaw, curving out of him. His mother wouldn’t let resentment turn her heart barren and dry like her brother’s. 

“Leave it to me,” she said. “Turgon no longer has a forgiving temperament. He casts blame about easily and with a heavy hand since his wife’s death, but he loves me, and heeds my desires. He will not cage me or mine against our will. Now come,” she patted the mattress beside her, “if I am to be confined to bed, then let us lie together.”

Maeglin slipped in beside her, kicking off his boots. He wrapped his arm around her waist, and pillowed her head on his shoulder. “What a pair we make,” he said around a smile, “we need a bath and I a clean set of clothing something awful.”

His mother laughed. “You should have seen the face the healer made when she helped me with my dress. She told me she would have it burned.” She picked up his hand, and began playing with his fingers. “Shall I tell you a story?”

He smiled against her hair. “Yes, please.”

“One of my father this time.” She turned her face up to his, eyes earnest, “I know I was not fully truthful in all my tales, but I swear to you, Lómion, my father is everything I have told you and so much more. He is the greatest and best man I have ever known. And when I tell you he will adore you, I vow to you on my life it is true.”

Maeglin closed his eyes and pressed a kiss to her temple. “I believe you.” And he did. He wanted to so badly he chose to believe.

After his mother’s story, she slipped into sleep. He held her in his arms, combing his hands through her hair. When they were free of this place, he would take her to Hithlum. But his father should travel with them. Maybe they could even stay for a short time if his father was there as well. His father might loath the Noldor, but Maeglin would be there with him. A few days meeting his grandfather and uncle Fingon, and then they would be off home.

He must have dosed off. He woke to his mother stirring restlessly in his arms. He frowned as he took in her face. A flush colored her cheeks, and sweat beaded her brow. 

He wiped damp hair back from her face, “Mother?”

Her eyes cracked open. The moonlight turned them glassy, or was it something else? His gaze flew about the room. What had they done with his father’s javelin? 

He eased her from his arms and went to the door. Two guards stood post. “Have the healer called, and bring my father’s javelin, the one that wounded my mother.”

They looked at him like he was a creature of slime crawled out of a dirty fountain. His shoulders tightened. He lifted his chin. “My mother, the Princess Aredhel, requires a healer.   
Go and fetch one. And bring me the javelin. It might have been coated in poison. The healer will want to examine it.” 

The guards looked to each other, not him, to decide whether they would answer to his order. One of them said, “Better to be safe,” and walked off.

Maeglin breathed the bitterness rooting about for a hold in his heart out. He would not let their shameful behavior change him. He went back to his mother.

He took her hand. Her skin was clammy, yet her face burned. “Mother? I have called for the healer. Everything will be—” His words closed up around the words. If his father had used one of his lethal poisons nothing would ever be alright again. 

The healer arrived in a bustle, and tried to swat Maeglin away from his mother’s side, but he would not be banished. He told the healer of his suspicions of poison. The healer sent him a glare as if this was all his fault (Maybe it was. If he’d only found the right words to convince his father to let him take his mother home, if he’d only entered his father’s mind sooner, before it had been too late, or found the right words, or run to him the moment he was brought into the hall, or never come here at all and waited for his father to catch him, taken his father into his arms, kissed the darkness from his mind, slotted their fingers together and brought his father with them to Hithlum. If only, if only…). At least the healer did not entirely ignore his words, and had the javelin sent for and the king informed.

The healer snatched up the javelin when the guard brought it in. She examined it and discovered a coating of some kind, but did not know the forest of Nan Elmoth like Maeglin. Maeglin asked to see it. He was brushed aside. He pointed out in a voice of surgical precision that he had lived in the forest the poison had originated from all his life. He did not add that he was the poisoner’s son, but the knowledge hung in the air.

The healer begrudgingly handed the javelin over, then hovered, sending Maeglin suspicious looks as he examined it. He examined it again. A third time. A forth. There had been no mistake in his first assessment.

He handed the javelin back and sat down heavy as a sack of rocks at his mother’s side. He touched her face. It burned hot under his hand. How long did she have left? An hour, two? “Mother, is it Lómion.”

She opened glassy eyes hazed with suffering. “My son.” Her hand lifted weakly. He clasped it between his. Her lips struggled for a smile, “My little prince.”

A sob broke from his chest. He threw himself at her, gathering her body in his arms. “Mother. Mother.” He kissed her cheeks, her brow.

“Let her rest,” the healer snapped, “you are disturbing her.”

“He could never disturb me,” his mother turned a scowl on the healer. “Leave him be. Leave us be. Go. Your skill will avail nothing now.”

The healer’s mouth pursed. She made no move to leave, but at least she did not try to pry Maeglin from his mother’s arms or call the guards to drag him off when she found she did not have the strength to take his mother from him. His mother stroked his hair, his face, whispering her love. Then she turned to the healer again, “Bring me my brother.”

“The king has already been informed your condition has worsened.”

“Well tell him I am dying and would see him before I do.”

But there was no need, for the door opened and Turgon stepped in. His mother pushed Maeglin gently back. He would not have let her go for any hands but her own. He gave up his place beside her for Turgon to take, and circled around the bed to sit on his mother’s other side and hold her hand while Turgon picked up the other.

“Turgon, my brother,” his mother’s voice rasped, and Maeglin pressed the water cup from the bedside table to her lips. She drank, then settled her eyes on Turgon’s face. She looked into it for a long, searching moment. “I know I have been a poor sister to you, but I need you to do one last favor for me, Brother. I need you to let Maeglin go to Father. This is no place for him, you know that. He belongs with Father. Promise me, promise me you will let him ride from this valley as you once let me.”

“And bitterly regretted it!” Turgon visibly drew himself back in. He dismissed the healer with a word, and after she left them alone, he said, voice shaped into the mold of composure, but his eyes still festered, “Look what that allowance has wrought? No, Sister, your son will be safer here, in Gondolin. There is no safer place outside Valinor.”

His mother let out a breath of laughter, no amusement in the sound. “Do not play ignorant with me. You know how he will be treated here. A half-blood. No, he cannot stay here. You _must_ let him go to Father.”

Turgon pulled himself even further behind cliff walls and said, “I cannot choose one Elf’s happiness above the survival of the many. I am the King of Gondolin, and her prosperity and protection must come first in all my rulings. It is for the good of Gondolin that your son abide within these walls.”

“Turgon,” his mother released Maeglin’s hand to grab onto Turgon’s arm, pulling on him like a drowning victim its rescuer. “This is my last wish, my dying wish. Do this for me, _please_. Please, Brother. I beg you. He is my son.”

Turgon’s eyes darkened. “As Idril is my daughter. And yet when _I_ begged—” A cord snapped tight between them, running thick with the past, though Maeglin knew not its root.

“I know!” his mother cried out with the sound of a heart ripping from its chest. “I know I failed you! As I failed Father, everyone, I failed you all! I have made so many mistakes. But Lómion, he is the one thing, the only thing I ever—” Her hands clawed at Turgon’s arm, tears leaking from her eyes, voice shredded and raw, “He is good in spite of me. I made a mess of everything but him. He is such a good boy, Turgon. So pure of heart. He is my savior, the joy of my _life_. Please, Brother, _please_. Let him go.”

Turgon pried his sister’s hands off him and held them in his large ones. He reached out and wiped the tears from her cheeks, and in her eyes relief blazed bright enough to spring fresh tears from Maeglin’s eyes to join the rest he’d wept. But then Turgon took that light and crushed it in his fist. “I will see he wants for nothing in Gondolin. I will ensure he is treated with respect.”

His mother’s face crumpled, and she turned her face from Turgon’s, yanking her hands away to hide her tears. Turgon stroked her hair and dropped more promises of how Maeglin would be cared for in Gondolin. His mother did not turn back to her brother, but wept.

Then, gathering the last of her strength as her tremors began to wrack her body, the poison sinking its fangs in, she looked back at Turgon, face wet with tears and flushed with fever, “Then spare Eöl. I loathe him for his imprisonment of me, but he is Maeglin’s father, and they love each other. When I am gone, Maeglin will need him.” Turgon’s mouth thinned. His mother’s hands flew out to grasp Turgon in a weakening grip, “Do not orphan my son! I beg of you! If there is any love left in your heart for me, grant me this last request!”

Turgon looked at her in silence a long moment in which Maeglin’s fists pressed into his stomach, breath frozen in his lungs. _Please_. Then Turgon nodded sharply and all the air whooshed back into Maeglin. “It will be so.” 

His mother sagged into the bed. “Thank you. _Thank you_.” She fumbled for Turgon’s hand, her own so weak and trembling she had not the strength to clasp it, but Turgon slipped his hand into hers and carried its weight as she brought it to her lips for a kiss. She looked into her brother’s eyes, her face etched with regret, “I am sorry I was not there for you after Elenwë died. I regretted _so much_.”

Turgon withdrew his hand from hers, face shutting down. “Let us not speak of it.”

Her mouth trembled, and she reached blindly for Maeglin. Maeglin took her into his arms at once, cradling her body against his chest as the convulsions began. She cried out at phantom shapes as the delirium from the poison took her. 

“I am here,” he washed her feverish brow with a wet cloth, never taking his arm from around her. He did not want her to fear, even for a moment, that she would die alone. 

She turned unfocused eyes on him, “Lómion?” Then, wildly, hand clawing at the air as if blind and lost in the dark. “Don’t leave me!”

He caught her hand, squeezing it so that his own would stop shaking. “I am right here, Mother.”

Her fingers tore feebly at his tunic sleeve. “I failed…I failed…you.”

“No, Mother. No.” He touched her cheek, tears slid down it.

“I failed…everyone. Father. I want…to go…home. I am sorry…sorry, Lómion,” her voice fluttered like a fragile bird. 

He kissed her hot cheek, “I forgive you. Always. I forgive everything.”

“My son,” she breathed, little more than a gasp, eyes unseeing, blinded by the poison. Her voice faded out, and then, so quietly the words fell apart in the air, “My little…prince.”

Her hand went limp in his. Her body slumped like a doll whose mistress had abandoned it on the floor, lifeless without those giant hands. He kissed his forehead to hers, and his tears dripped onto her face. He stroked her beautiful hair, pressed his lips into her cheek, and cupped her body like his child’s. He held her until her skin went cold under his and his shoulders had stopped shaking. 

He slipped his fingers from hers and gently folded her hands across her breast, wiping her face clean of sweat-scum and tear tracks. Turgon had not moved from his seat, and Maeglin looked up at him. Turgon stared at Aredhel’s lifeless body, transfixed, as if he could not believe she was really dead. There were no tears on his face.

Turgon’s gaze shifted to him. Whatever Turgon felt, he kept it locked away. He stood and turned away from the bed, walking to the door.

Maeglin was arranging his mother’s hair on the pillows when Turgon returned with two guards. Maeglin’s eyes shifted between the three of them. Turgon said, “They will escort you to the rooms prepared for you.”

Maeglin’s hands curled in his mother’s hair. “I am not ready to leave her.”

A muscle jumped in Turgon’s jaw. “You are not the only one who lost her. Others deserve to mourn her in privacy.” He meant he wanted to be left along with Aredhel’s body, whether to weep over or stare at, Maeglin didn’t know or care.

Maeglin touched his mother’s cheek one last time, but this was only her body now, who she was was no longer housed inside. He rose and circled the bed, but stopped before Turgon. “I need to see my father.”

Turgon’s eyes flared, “Your mother is not yet cold on the bed and you beg for her murderer? Would you like to join him in a cell, son of Eöl?”

Maeglin tripped over confusion. Hadn’t Turgon promised his mother on her deathbed? He must tread carefully now. He did not know how Turgon might lash out when his eyes burned like a wounded bear’s. “I shall retire now,” he walked slowly around Turgon, watching his hands in case Turgon struck. But he made it out of the room without injury or earning a place in a cell. 

The guards led him to the –his room. His fancy prison cell. Turgon had ruled: Maeglin would never walk freely from this corpse city.

Maeglin sat down on the bed and focused on breathing through the walls closing in around him. He could still feel the shape of his mother’s body in his arms. She was dead. He didn’t think the enormity of it had hit him yet. He was still trying to breathe through the shock. 

He lay down on the bed in his dirty, travel-stained clothing, wrapped his arms around a pillow, and cried. When the sobs finished wracking his body, he stood, washed his face in the basin, and walked to the door. He had to find his father.

He opened the door. The same two guards stood stationed at it. He shut it and paced through the room. Prison cell indeed. 

What did Turgon mean to do with his father and him? He had promised they would live (and dropped other promises about Maeglin that would have been pretty if they were not all grown in a corpse city and given at his mother’s deathbed), but _how_ would they live? As guarded prisoners for the rest of their lives? Yet if he had his father with him, if they could be cellmates together, they could endure this. They would be each other’s docks in a sea of simmering hate, but together they would endure.

He needed to find him. He went to the door again and opened it. Time to test the length of his chains. He walked through it and passed the guards. They shifted. His shoulders tensed, but he did not stop walking down the corridor. Their boots sounded behind him, trailing him, but not locking him back up.

He did not know if his father was imprisoned in a cell of stone deep below the earth, or, like him, kept under guard in a room, or even if he was in the palace or out in the city stacked in tall storied buildings of marble. His father was lost somewhere in a land hostel to the both of them, so he plucked one of his mother’s tales up from its special nestling place in his heart, for it was one of his favorites, and pushed it through his lungs and out his mouth. He started singing like Fingon had cast his voice out over the Thangorodrim for Maedhros, and Maedhros answered.

He had hardly sung one note when one of the guards at his back snapped, “You are causing a disturbance in the palace. It is nearly the midnight hour, and the city is abed.”

He did not turn to look over his shoulder as he asked, “Is it against your city’s laws to sing?”

There was a pause, and then, “It is to cause a disturbance in the streets.”

“Have I caused a disturbance in the streets?”

No answer. He picked up his broken-off note. He flung his voice out louder this time, until it floated into all the bedchambers in the palace wing. It carried the grace and silk of starlight, and the freedom and innocence unstained of a race newborn under the star’s light. He sang in the Star Tongue of his people’s joy and awe at awakening to this wondrous world. He sang in the spirit language of all Quendi whose hearts longed for the womb they birthed from, like a broken body longed for its mother to come kiss it back together.

He walked on moonlight through corridors each as foreign in their glitter and pomp as the last. There was only one root in this land, one home in this alien city, and it was his father. Doors opened, faces peered out at him, bed-heads, scowls, sleep-lax bodies stirred and grumpy about it, and that word, passed from door to door as he walked on a river of silver spilled forth from lips: Moriquende.

He lifted his voice higher. But though he walked through corridor after corridor, spiraling down into the depths of the palace, no voice sang back. He climbed back up, higher this time, high as the sparrow flew. He opened the doors of a terrace overlooking a garden hung with rose vines. 

The palace rose from the crest of the hill the city walked down like a stairway until its lowest level heeled the valley floor, but did not spread toes upon, for every inch of the valley, and climbing the encircling mountains in terraces, were crop fields. From Maeglin’s vantage point he could see the lamps lit in the first gate to the city. Gondolin slumbered, curled about the hill like a Dragon its horde.

He sang, voice flung wide to embrace the whole city in its starlight arms. The stars heard and turned their ears to listen to the echo of their children. The clouds rolled back, and the stars sang with Maeglin of galaxies. Maeglin sang to them of consolations named under their light on a lakeshore where they were the epitome of beauty and the mother of all. He sang to them of children whose souls were nebulae busting with life in all the colors of the rainbow.

A voice leapt up to twine with his own, singing with starlight in the language of the stars. It was not his father’s voice. But it yearned for what was lost to it: freedom and innocence. It cried out with a heart haggard by centuries of boots pressed into the fragile valley of its neck. 

Another voice rose, not his father’s, but one battling with despair, its light almost crushed, but now, inside the silver sky of the song, it drank renewal and remembered who it had once been before it became collared dog. One last voice rose, hope like rose peddles gathered in its throat, delicate, but fragrant. Together they bathed the city in star-song.

Lamps flared to life. The city roused like a stirred Dragon by a thief crept into its horde. Armed guards marched through the streets, down to the dregs, to the heel the city’s bulk sought to crush with the massive weight of its steel-tipped boot. The guards wrecked their way through the lowest district of the city, the one walled off from the clean, pristine streets paved with marble and housing the overlords. 

Screams, the breaking down of doors, smashed furniture, the scent of boot heels and rule by fear.

The star-song faltered, one voice dropping, and then the next. It folded in on itself like the singers’ people were folding in over their tender insides as the guard-sticks lashed punishment into any Wood-elf within reach. It didn’t matter whose voices had sung, only that the star-song smacked of rebellion and had to be _put down_.

With his back to the guards at his shoulder, Maeglin wiped the tears from his cheeks, inhaled, exhaled, straightened his back, and faced them. He did not look at them as he walked passed, but he could hear the gloat in their steps behind him. 

His father’s voice had not been among the singers. What had they done to him? Had they beaten him into unconsciousness? 

Maeglin’s throat worked and worked to swallow down the loathing clogging it. No. _No_. Only it wasn’t as easy to uproot it now, was it? He was being educated in how good men like his father and Breglos’ hearts became rocks in their chests when the word Golodh rode the air. 

But he couldn’t let this bitterness take root. His mother had promised him there was so much _more_ to the Noldor than _this_. His mother had sworn that there were Noldor out there, family, who would have opened their arms to him because their hearts were not strangled with weeds. Maeglin had to keep the garden of his own heart flourishing and thornless so that when he met them, he could open his arms back and embrace them, kiss their cheeks, and call them kin.

*

Maeglin had lain wake unable to find rest in dreams that night. It was only with the first blush of dawn that he finally drifted off. He awoke only an hour later to the sound of someone entering his rooms.

He sat up and curled his hand around the handle of the knife he’d hidden under his pillow. Turgon strode into his bedroom without knocking, cloaked in the air of a king who thought he had the right to anything and anyone. He eyed Maeglin a moment, face blank as a mirror, then tossed a clean set of clothing on the bed. He clipped the command to get dressed, and strode back out.

Maeglin shed the dirty clothing he’d slept in, and pulled on the clean ones. They were finer than anything he’d ever worn, fit for a prince. They felt like a straight-jacket. 

He found Turgon at the window, watching the last of the sunrise. Turgon turned at his entrance, eyes scanning Maeglin again as if unpicking him for flaws. “Take that necklace off.”

Maeglin’s fingers jumped to his throat, clenching around the jet. “Why?”

“It is not of Noldorin make.”

Maeglin’s chin rose, “No, it is not. My father made it for me.”

Turgon’s lip curled. “All the worse. Get it off.”

Maeglin weighed the benefits of defiance and found few. Slowly, fingers trembling with suppressed emotion, he unclasped the necklace. Before Turgon could snap out an order of what to do with it, he tucked it inside his tunic, over his heart. 

Turgon’s mouth pinched, but he did not try to wrestle it from Maeglin’s grasp with the pliers of his position as Maeglin’s jailer. Instead he crossed to Maeglin, and Maeglin braced himself. “After the display you put on last night, it is all the more vital that you distance yourself from your father’s blood. If you are to build a life for yourself in Gondolin, you must nurture the Noldo in you. If you fail to do this, the people of Gondolin will make life unpleasant for you, and not even my favor would shift that.”

Maeglin did not want the life of a man who cut out half of himself so that he could slip between the cracks. That man was a man ashamed of himself, a man that had let his jailers define everything about him from what he wore to how he perceived the man in the mirror. But Maeglin did not voice his intention to be nothing but himself to Turgon.

At Maeglin’s silence, Turgon continued, “I promised my sister you would have a place of respect here in Gondolin, and so you shall as long as you do not squander my advice and choose to live as your father’s son and not your mother’s. However, you demonstrated last night that you are not ready to look to your own future as yet. You are still young, and so I shall guide you. Guards!” Maeglin took a step back, body coiled, as four guards marched crisply through the door. “Proceed.”

The guards’ eyes fell on him as they strode forward, fanning out to catch him if he should bolt. And run where? Maeglin held his ground. They put hands on him, two holding him by his arms and shoulders, the other two stationed close in case he put up a fight. They seemed disappointed he had not given them a chance to hunt him down. 

These Noldor had a sickness in their hearts. They had grown inward like toenails attacking the body. Maeglin fingered through his heart, seeking the compassion that had never failed him before. They were _sick_ , he needed to forgive them. They were to be pitied, not hated. Hate destroyed nothing but the heart it harbored in. He was _trying_. Why must they make it so hard to forgive them?

He looked into the guards’ eyes, passed the bones of Noldor. A hurt in their pasts, or an imbalance of the mind must had turned them into men panting after violence. They had forgotten how to look back into his eyes and see a man with eyes and hands and lungs and heart formed just like theirs. They were to be pitted for having lost the priceless gift of empathy. He did pity them, and in so doing bloomed forgiveness in his heart. He must not forget himself as they had forgotten themselves. He must not let this city of corpses turn his heart a twin of theirs.

Turgon pulled out a silver chain a diamond swung from. Power bled from it, unraveling with a ferocious pace from the diamond storing it. It was no object of Power, but a crude anchoring of it. A spell had been knotted around the diamond, and Maeglin picked up the thread of more than one _fëar_ that had fed its Power into it.

Temporarily anchoring a spell in gem or metal was not uncommon, nor did it require advanced technique. Without the long labor necessary to bind the Power in the forging of an object of Power, the Power would spill out, fading away by measures until all that was left was a diamond once more. Few Quendi had the ability to hold a spell in Song for the length of hours, like his mother told him Maglor and Finrod could. Those that could not turned to gem and metal to enhance the longevity of their spell-work.

Maeglin eyed the diamond, trying to unravel the nature of the spell. Turgon had not underestimated him by the size of that fist of Power. He had infused the diamond with enough Power to hold a Quendë with deep wells of Power, as was a common find among the Finwëions.

“What is the purpose of this?” he asked as Turgon stepped closer, lifting the necklace.

Turgon met his eyes, no guilt waited there for Maeglin to unearth, only cool cliff sides. “You must be seen to distance yourself from your father, and I cannot trust you to act in your best interests. So, for the sake of my sister, I must see to them.”

Maeglin stood straight as a blade as Turgon pulled the necklace over his head. There was nothing to do but face what would come with dignity. And forgiveness. He looked into Turgon’s eyes as Turgon swept the tunic back from Maeglin’s throat to expose its hollow and drop the necklace inside so it could fuse directly with his skin. He must forgive. He _must_. Turgon was misguided, but not malicious in his actions. He thought he was acting in Maeglin’s own good. Maeglin could forgive—

Walls of diamond closed over him, coffining him, burying him inside his own mind, cutting him off from his body. He looked out through the distortion of the diamond walls. It was like observing the world through a layer of water, and being reduced to a puppet in his own body.

His hearing was not affected, and Turgon’s voice ordered, “Take him up to the wall. I want him in position before the crowds gather. Make it look as natural as possible.”

“Yes, my king,” the guards steered Maeglin to the door by his arms. His body moved at their command. Their hands on his body were the puppet masters. They could do _anything_ to him. He was utterly helpless and at their mercy.

He balled a fist of Power and punched it into the diamond wall. It did not shatter, it did not even fracture. He scooped up a bigger handful and punched again. He kept punching, battering it all the way to the wall. Only a few Quendi were gathered on its heights as yet. The guards dropped down to one, a single hand on his elbow, subtly steering him into position. For what? 

Maeglin did not stop throwing his Power at the diamond as the crowd swelled around him. There were fractures now. Turgon should have employed a few more Quendi to feed their Power into the spell; Maeglin would be free within the hour. But then his father was dragged forward, and an hour would be too late. 

Maeglin threw himself like a wild thing at the wall, panicked and desperate. No, no, no, this couldn’t be happening! No, please! Turgon _promised_. He swore to his sister on her deathbed. And Maeglin, like a naïve fool, had believed that meant something to a man like Turgon. 

He built himself into a mountain of love and _slammed_ himself against the diamond wall.

*

Rope bound Eöl’s hands as they led him to the steep precipice. He could barely see his eyes were so blinded by the light. His head pound pound pounded from the brightness. They would kill him. 

Death used to terrify him. Not anymore. There was existence, _life_ , on its other side. There was Anneth waiting for him. Míriel and Finwë’s souls were trapped somewhere in the not-Quendi lands, but the Golodhrim believed their dead would be reborn as well.

But he needed his son to look at him one last time with love shinning like jewels in his eyes. But the man wearing his son’s face was not his Maeglin. He was a creature of Aredhel’s, of these Golodhrim. Eöl could find none of his Maeglin Starchild in that remote, expressionless face that watched him being led to his death without a flicker of care or regret.

_love you no more_

“Look at me!” He fought the hands restraining him, pulling him closer to the edge. Maeglin wouldn’t meet his eyes. Eöl was _sorry_. He was so, so…please, Maeglin, _please!_

“Look at me, Maeglin! Do you forsake your father? And our people?” He needed Maeglin to look at him, just look, and then he would not die with this emptiness like a shovel removing all his insides, digging and tearing and leaving him alone and abandoned. 

It wasn’t death he feared, it was what his dying would do to his Breglos without Maeglin Starchild. Maeglin had to go home, to Breglos. Breglos needed Maeglin’s arms to pull him from the darkness, as Breglos had pulled Eöl. Maeglin Starchild would have needed Breglos too. They would have been each other’s stars when all the other stars had fallen from the sky. Eöl could have died in peace knowing his Breglos and his Maeglin had each other. Maeglin was supposed to go _home_.

“Here you will fail in all your hopes, and here you may yet die the same death as I!” Don’t you see? These are not your people. They will betray you one day. They will never accept you as their equal. There is no happiness waiting for you inside their fool’s gold cities, Maeglin! Go home! 

But Maeglin would not even _look_ at—

Maeglin’s eyes snapped to his. A mountain of love slammed into him and burned away all the _love you no more_ despair in the brilliant jewel-light of its glow. Spring burst open in his heart. 

His Maeglin Starchild was right there, loving him, and longing for home. But these Golodhrim had not only caged his Maeglin in this city of light with its underbelly crawling with ugliness and rot, they had entombed his Maeglin inside his own mind. Maeglin fought so hard to run to him, he wanted to run to him, he wanted to save him and hold him and run far, far away from rotten cities together, but Maeglin had not sprung free of the trap yet. He’d only punched a hole through its weaving. Soon, though, soon.

But it was too late, for the hands were pushing him, and his feet were reaching for stone that was not there. He clung to the hand of Maeglin’s mind until gravity took him from his Maeglin. His heart was an open floodgate love roared through into Maeglin’s. Maeglin’s anguished cry inside his mind was the last thing he knew before the rocks broke his body.

*

Breglos’ heart tolled the truth in the deep throated clang of a mourning bell: Eöl was dead. But he kept searching, for a sign, a way, some clue, some last thread of hope to cling to. He hadn’t held Eöl’s dead body in his arms, maybe…maybe…

And what of Maeglin? Did he know his father was—were all Eöl’s fears reaping the truth? Was Maeglin held captive against his will by the Golodhrim? Did he need Breglos to come save him?

But Breglos couldn’t _find_ him!

Weeks, months? How long had he scoured these lands over and over, circling back to the last of Eöl’s tracks one more time, then again and again, but some Golodhrim sorcery concealed the way. He could smell it in the air, the perpetual scent of the sea that did not belong this far inland. But he could not pierce it.

He might have never given up his search. He might have spent the rest of his days wandering this little corner of the world, unable to let go, until an Orc arrow or starvation struck him down. But Súlmae had sent word to his father. His father found him out in the wilds, searching and searching.

Beleg took his hand and led him away to a nearby stream rushing through this rocky hill country. Beleg undressed them, and walked with Breglos naked out into the stream. Its cool fingers nipped at his ankles, then his calves, up to his thighs. 

Beleg pushed down on his shoulders until Breglos’ head submerged. Breglos let Beleg hold him under without a fight, his trust in his father absolute. He opened his eyes underwater and let it eroded all the grime from his skin and weariness from his bones. His broken heart though it could not mend.

Beleg drew him back up, and the air pulled sharp and clear into his lungs. Beleg started bathing him until Breglos’ fingers curled around the soap, finding the strength to care for himself. They dressed in silence, and without needing words, began the long trek back to Nan Elmoth.

Breglos sat awake every night staring at the stars, an empty hole in his chest. His father would slide up behind him and wrap his arms around him, his hand pressing over Breglos’ chest, right over his heart. Beleg sang softly to him in the Star Tongue until the weariness grinding into his bones pulled him down into a restless dose against his father’s shoulder.

They went home to a home that would never really be home again, but was the only thing Breglos had left. Írimial saw him first, and the clay pot in her hands slipped through her fingers to shatter on the ground. She let out a great piercing sound, an ululation of grief, for he returned alone. Her voice was as shrill as an eagle’s scream, as sorrowful as a wounded swallow. 

The Wolf Clan stepped out of their homes, left their tasks, taking up the call. Their tongues vibrated in a haunting trill, mourning as the Quendi had done ever since the Dark Hunter preyed upon them. Their people held vigil all through the night, singing their grief to the stars. 

Tomorrow they would hold the Burial Rights. Breglos would know then, no more last, impossible hope passed the grave, that Eöl was dead.

He walked the empty halls of the house to their room. He curled up on their furs, pressed his nose into them and tried to inhale the scent of his mate. But it had already faded, as if Eöl’s body had never warmed these furs, or awoken soft with sleep in Breglos’ arms, or tasted the pleasure they found in each other’s bodies, and pillowed them while they lay entwined and sated. 

Eöl had been his mate star season upon star season before the moon’s rising. They had wandered Beleriand side-by-side, exploring its beauties and naming streams and mountain tops, and christening hundreds of meadows and grasslands with their cries of pleasures as they moved in each other’s bodies under the starlight. Breglos didn’t remember what life was like before his Eöl entered his like a man came into a woman and planted the seed of life within her.

Beleg came to him as he lay weeping in the furs, and would have curled around him, but Breglos needed to be alone tonight with only Eöl wrapped around him. Súlmae came to him as well, and his sister would have taken him into her arms and tried to sooth his broken heart, but there was no soothing pain like this. He only wanted Eöl tonight (forever).

When the sun had long risen and its summer-time rays heated the room, Breglos stirred from the furs. He went to his chest and selected what he would wear to the Burial Rights tonight. He picked out a pair of white deerskin leggings soft as buttermilk, and from its special velvet wrap, he drew the pearl necklace Eöl had gifted him. 

It was still as beautiful as the first time he’d seen it illuminating that clearing in the sunlight. But standing behind its luster had been his Eöl, and Eöl was a black diamond outshining the glow of pearl-light with his radiance. Oh, how he had smiled. His _smile_. If Breglos could have just one piece of his Eöl, if he could have—but there was no one piece, there was only everything, _everything_ about him.

Breglos closed his eyes and wiped the fresh tears away. His fingers gathered locks of his hair and braided a long tail all the way up to his nape. Then he cut the slender braid and tied off its end. He curled it beside the pearl necklace, waiting for the moonlight.

He went to Maeglin’s room next. The room was laid out exactly as it always was, as if Maeglin was only down at the forge with his father and would be back in a few hours. Breglos’ eyes snagged on one note of discord in the room. He went to the bedside table and picked up the folded parchment. He opened it. Súlmae had said Maeglin had left a message, but knowing could not prepare Breglos for the moment of reading it. 

He staggered, falling to the bed as if his knees had been knocked out from under him. Oh, Maeglin. He had had no idea, no idea at all. The letter was full of promises to return soon, and an out pouring of love for them. It was unbearably sweet and innocent of the evils of the world, a perfect reflection of the beauty of Maeglin’s heart. But Maeglin had come face-to-face with the evil that could grow and fester in Quendi hearts now. Had the Golodhrim taken that precious beauty and squeezed it to death in their greedy, cruel fists? 

Breglos pressed his face into Maeglin’s pillows and wept anew, this time for Maeglin’s loss. The house felt empty and cold without Eöl and Maeglin’s starlight to blaze back all the shadows.

When the keen slice of sorrow had ebbed enough for his body to stop shaking with tears, he rose and returned to the errand that had brought him into Maeglin’s room. Maeglin would want a piece of himself laid inside Eöl’s grave. Breglos went to Maeglin’s jewelry chest and looked for a piece that called to him, but none were quite right. 

His eyes swept over the room. They landed on Maeglin’s toy chest. Maeglin had not shoved it into a storage room as he outgrew his toys, but left it there under his window. His favorite toys, his knights, were still lined up neatly on its lid. 

Breglos picked up the Finwë knight. Maeglin used to carry it around everywhere, tucked under his arm. Breglos’ heart told him he’d found what he’d sought. If Maeglin were here with them, he would have chosen this to lay with his father’s spirit in the grave.

The sun rimmed the western horizon in a strip of deep gold as it set. The boldest stars were already visible in the high heavens where the sky was a polished amethyst. Breglos led the Wolf Clan into the clearing. They had made themselves as beautiful as their forest home, as colorful as flowers. They had thrown off their everyday wear and pulled on dyed buckskins –white, scarlet, yellow, and violet—rich silver, sorrel, and russet furs, and dyed fabrics bursting with colorful embroidery. They’d painted their faces, hands, and bared feet in vibrate blue designs, strung their hair with their best jewels and droplets of glass, and wrapped strings of beads and peals about their necks. 

The clearing had a little brook weaving through the patchwork of graves overgrown with grass. Irises marched along the book’s flanks, but upon the graves blue columbine had been planted in remembrance of the dead they housed. The Clan arranged themselves in a circle, and watched in respectful silence as Breglos and Írimial dug the grave. 

A wolf pelt had been spread out on the grass, and pieces of Eöl had migrated there: copper cups he’d gifted to a friend, an exquisitely crafted dagger, a stunning silver bowl, a lamp so delicately fashioned it could have passed for a living flower. Breglos had been the first to approach the fur. He’d laid down the long braid of his own hair, the last of the Galvorn metal he’d wrapped in a leather skin, and Maeglin’s Finwë knight.

There was no body to lower into the grave, so when Breglos and Írimial finished shoveling out the earth, they rolled up the fur with its collection of gifts and placed it as gently as a swaddled babe into the grave. 

The sky darkened from purple to a blue so deep it bled into black as the Clan rose and formed a winding line. One by one they walked passed the open grave in a long procession. Each Elf drew daggers as their turn to stand over their lord’s grave came, and sliced their palms. The blood spilled over the grave. 

The encircling trees leaned closer, branches creaking. Magick swirled in the tree’s shadows, rising off the forest floor like steam. The dead had answered their call. They inhabited the tree leaves and rested in the bark, they stirred from the gorse and heather feathering the forest floor, and watched from the eyes of deer and mice and sparrows.

The Land awoke with the dead. It crawled down their spines like a giant’s breath puffing against their napes. It thrummed like drums in the soles of Breglos’ bare feet, exhaling in the earth beneath him like the breath from a pair of lungs so enormous they destroy all sense of infinity.

The sound of a doe’s bleating broke the solemn silence of the clearing. Súlmae led the doe forward, the rope looped about the doe’s neck used as the pull-line. The doe fought, as was only natural for a wild animal. A blindfold had been tied over its eyes, but it could still smell the blood.

Breglos approached the doe, running a hand over the beauty’s tawny coat. His dagger’s blade caught in the night’s pale light. “Free creature of the forest, we offer you as sacrifice.” The dagger flashed down across the blinded doe’s neck. A spray of blood spilled into the grass, but the doe had not screamed. “Let the offering of blood return our beloved dead! We call Eöl Starborn forth!” 

They hauled the doe’s body into the grave. Her blood soaked into the wolf pelt and mingled with the Quendi blood. The Clan’s eyes turned to search the shadows between the trees.

A _fëa_ emerged from the gloom. It hovered on the outskirts of the clearing, watching, before floating out from the shadows, a fist of impossibly pure silver light. As it bobbed towards them, riding wind currents, or maybe the threads of unseen Power, it uncurled from its fist of diamond light. It spread itself out, fighting for form until it loped across the grass in the shape of a silver wolf.

The damage inflicted on the _fëa_ by the hand of Evil was revealed as the _fëa_ unballed. Its edges were frayed, but its core shone star-bright, declaring the purity of its heart untainted by Darkness. Darkness sought to deform it, but though Darkness veined the outer ring of the _fëa_ , creeping inwards, it had not been consumed. 

It was so beautiful it hurt, and Breglos’ heart wept with grief for all his Eöl had suffered, but swelled with pride too, for Eöl had conquered the Dark. Even in black pits of despair and anguish, Eöl had held onto to Eöl and not Lost himself in the Dark.

The Clan lifted bloody fists as one, pointing their arms to the sky like arrows, their voices rising in a cry: “Eöl Starborn!”

The Clan made a colonnade with their bodies, like receiving a king, and the star-bright wolf walked down the line. He paused to nuzzle outstretched hands, though his substance slipped right through the Elves’ mournful touches. When he came abreast with Breglos, he tried to touch Breglos with his nose. His _fëa_ flared and writhed with distress when he could not reach his Breglos. 

Breglos knelt to look into Eöl’s eyes. His hands lifted to frame that alpine face, not able to touch, but hovering as close as he could to holding his Eöl one last time. “I will be here waiting for you when you birth from starlight a second time. I will be right here when you come back to me.” Eöl lifted his paw and passed it through Breglos’ chest, starlight palming his heart. 

Breglos’ voice was deep as ocean surf, and trembled as he recited the words that would lay Eöl’s houseless spirit to rest. “Into the womb of the Land we send you, Eöl Starborn. May your spirit find peace as you walk through your season of nakedness, and may your journeys within its womb lead you swiftly towards the secret knowledge of rebirth. We await that joyous reunion.” 

Eöl turned his face towards the grave, turning one last look over his pointed shoulder to Breglos. Then he lay his silver body down in the earth beside the slaughtered doe, and slowly sunk into the arms of the Land until his transparent form washed away in the ocean of the Land’s mighty breast.


	41. Chapter 36

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 36

Glorfindel rode at the head of his company of mounted knights. The valley of the Tumladen was flat as the sea, and their coming had been spotted from the city walls. A procession had gathered to welcome them back into Gondolin’s clinging arms with pomp.

Glorfindel would have snuck in with the moonlight through the lesser North Gate, but Turgon ordered all the mountain patrols to make a show of their return. It lifted moral, and painted the false glamour of valiant knights returning from battle. There had been no battle of course. Glorfindel hadn’t even killed a sulking Orc snuffling through the mountains in a decade. There was only an army rotting in disuse, or rather in _ill_ -use: fallen from honor into the muck of prison guards.

The high towers shouldering the Main Gate were lined with guards bedecked in the armor of soldiers. They bore the crests of the Houses regulated to the protection of the city, or in other words: making sure the Wood-elves didn’t murder Noldor in their beds. Glorfindel would have pitied Lord Egalmoth and Penlod’s Houses this duty if so many of them hadn’t learned to enjoy inflicting fear, discovering a pleasure akin to the sexual in the domination they held over the Wood-elves.

On rare occasion, when returning after a long station in the mountains, Glorfindel joined his men at the taverns for a few drinks. The city guards flocked to such establishments, and wine loosened their tongues. To hear the city guards talk, they were to be pitied, having the worst lot in the valley. They liked to bemoan how horrible it was to be surrounded by Wood-elves all day: their alien tongue, their savage culture, having their murderous eyes on their backs hour after hour, knowing the Wood-elves wanted them dead as surely as any Orc. Glorfindel pitied them not at all; he pitied their victims.

The marble towers, flowered gardens, and affluence of Gondolin began once the Main Gate was pierced. But before the high walls rimming the flat crest of the Amon Gwareth, came the outer district of the city the Wood-elves had been denigrated to. Here the houses clawed for a foothold in the hill’s climbing slopes, eking out a jumble of crooked streets and houses propped up with legs of stone when all the flat real estate had been claimed. 

The Wood-elves’ District had been walled. Couldn’t have them escaping, now could they? Every Wood-elf the Noldor stood over in dominance, pushing into the dust with the merciless heels of their boots, was an enemy they had groomed and birthed with their own foul deeds.

Thick walls may segregate Gondolin proper from the Wood-elves’ Distinct, but the fear was still there, and was joined by the fortress-like atmosphere they all lived under. Guards stood at the gates and combed the city streets after nightfall. Wood-elves were required to carry identification on their person at all times –who they served, what their position was—and if found wandering Gondolin after dark without a pass from their lords, were subject to harsh punishments. It was like living in a city under siege. 

Glorfindel’s company rode up the King’s Way to the gates opened wide to receive them. But before they breeched the Main Gate and slid into the arms of their welcoming party, they had to ride through the Wood-elves’ District. The King’s Way penetrated it like an artery, and on either side of its wide, paved street were walls of marble, like grave stones trying to beautify a cemetery. 

Guarded gates interspersed the marble walls, all left open during the day for the flow of Wood-elf labor. Some served in the city, acting as domestic labor for lords and ladies. Others were City Servants, those unfortunate souls whose duty it was to clean the sewers, sweep the streets until they shone like the sun, or other such tasks spurned by Noldor. Others did not turn their feet up to Gondolin, but down to the Noldor-owned fields. There they bent their backs to provide the Noldor with their lives of comfort. The wheat fields, orchards, and vineyards were made rich and profitable by the thousands of Wood-elves laboring in them. Noldor overseers watching them like crows.

As Glorfindel’s company rode through the Main Gate, trumpet blasts sounded and cheers rose in their _honor_ , as if they had accomplished anything worth honoring.

The crowd turn-out for the return of the House of the Golden Flower bulged beyond the reception the Houses of the Swallow and Fountain received on their return from mountain patrols, for their lords rarely accompanied their men. Glorfindel escaped the city whenever he could seize the chance.

The city’s inhabitants had flocked out to catch a glimpse of him now. Women tossed flowers before the hooves of his high-stepping horse. The bold ones called out to him, the shy ones giggled and flushed. How beautiful, brave, and noble Lord Glorfindel was! Look how proud and straight he sat his horse, and how his armor shone, but his golden hair shone all the brighter!

His eyes skimmed over their faces, blobs of color he did not look directly into. He smiled. It split his face like a knife.

They thought he was perfect. They wanted someone beautiful, talented, gracious, sparkling. They wanted someone they could fit into the frame of their expectations and place upon an altar. An idol to worship and lust after.

All the things they admired in him was just an act. He wondered sometimes what was left of him beneath all the pretending. 

He didn’t consider himself a good person. It wasn’t only the resentment through which he viewed Gondolin and its inhabitants, he also cared little for the majority of the world, and cared far too much what they thought of him. His secret chained him as surely as Gondolin’s mountain walls. He lived from shadow to shadow, terrified of the day his mask would be stripped from him. He’d set a vice about his own tongue, afraid to voice his true opinions lest they called attention to himself. 

He’d conformed, muzzled, and betrayed himself every day. He hated himself for it. But he’d always hated himself, even before he started fitting his feet into the boots of an oppressor and prison guard without opening his mouth to cry out that this was wrong!

When he had escaped his idolizers and reported to Turgon (little to report, no Enemy sightings), he retreated to the thin comfort of his own house. His steward hustled to his side at once, a peeved expression knotting the man’s brow (Glorfindel had tarried overlong on in the mountains _again_ ). Glorfindel unenthusiastically promised to run over the Houses’ management after he’d had a proper bath and hot meal. 

He shouldered off his duties as lord onto his steward’s head as often as he could slink away with. He wanted nothing to do with council rooms, politics, or the responsibilities a lord commanded. He wouldn’t have established a House in the first place if Turgon had not assigned him the duty. He made a poor lord, but the people under his care were treated well in the hands of his steward.

A Wood-elf prepared a bath. Glorfindel avoided looking at the Wood-elves in service to his House, save only to ensure they were still clothed with what dignity he could give them in such a cheap form, and that their cheeks were not hollowed or bodies bruised. While he laid down a strict law on the treatment of the Wood-elves in his House, he did not trust the hearts of the Noldor in his own House to be free of corruption. He could not afford for blindness on his part to lead to abuse. He did _nothing_ to ease the suffering of thousands of Wood-elves trapped in this hell, the least he could do was ensure the ones wearing the emblem of his House were not mistreated, even if they were used as labor.

He would not have taken any Wood-elf into his service, but if not his House, then they would have been assigned another. At least in his service they and their families had enough to eat and never knew the rod.

It sounded like an excuse to make up for all the words of protest he had never spoken, like balm he rubbed over his conscience to sooth the _nothing_ he had done. He was a coward, a shirking cowering coward. He hated himself. And yet he still did _nothing_.

When he had bathed and filled his belly with a meal (prepared by forced labor), he resigned himself to the first of many evenings catching up on the duties he’d shirked. His steward launched right into the mountain of work. Glorfindel bypassed the political maneuvers of the other lords, those were always the most headache inducing. His steward began updating him on a dispute between two managers of his vineyards. 

Which reminded him, he’d have to ride out to every vineyard and orchard he owned, and inspect the treatment of the Wood-elves laboring over his crops. His gut sickened. Was he not a benevolent master? How generous that he used his valuable time to see to his lowly servants’ welfare. Oh noble, virtuous Lord Glorfindel, kiss his feet, honor him with great praise, has any Wood-elf had such a kind master as he? Where was their _gratitude_?

He would have let the vineyards and orchards go fallow and wild, the fruit rotting on the trees and never stained one hand with their juices, never been the cause of a brow beading with sweat, or a back bent in forced labor, but that wasn’t how Gondolin worked. Keep up now! You know the rules. If it was not your fields, it was someone else’s, with a concaved stomach and busies throw in as well. 

And Gondolin didn’t let food rot on the trees for the pleasure of a soothed conscience. Glorfindel’s vineyards and orchards were worth their weight in jewels in a valley cramping thousands in, so many mouths to feed. Bypass the hungry Wood-elf ones a few more times, we have to fill our own first, isn’t that right? 

The birthrate among the Wood-elves had dropped to no more than a half-dozen newborns a year, if that. An Elven woman’s womb dried up under the cramp of hunger or the heel of despair. The Noldor women regulated unwanted pregnancies with herbs to prevent conception. Pregnancy was not outlawed or scorned, but the valley had reached its full capacity, and population growth was discouraged.

A Wood-elf bound in service to his house interrupted his steward’s briefing with a knock. At least the Wood-elf did not scrape and bow, apologizing profusely for the interruption as Glorfindel had seen to his sickened heart in other lord’s houses (and eternal shame that he had said _nothing_ ). The Wood-elf announced the arrival of Princess Idril, who came to call on Lord Glorfindel. 

His steward shot him a look promising he’d not escape his claws next time as Glorfindel followed the Wood-elf out. Idril had been shown into one of the front receiving rooms. She turned from her inspection of his garden through the tall, bay window as he entered.

She smiled the smile reserved especially for him: one full of sorrow and longing. He looked away. Her voice rang with false cheer, trying to cover up its wobble, “You have been away so long. It is good to have you back.”

He had fled the city eighteen months ago. He wouldn’t have returned now if Turgon hadn’t ordered it. He had been creating one excuse after the other to delay his return, and had stretched the length of his deployment past the traditional three months for mountain patrols. The men under his command had rotated out, fresh ones riding in, but he had always invented some pressing need why he couldn’t ride back with them.

Ecthelion’s carelessly cruel words smacked painfully, if unsurprisingly, into his ears: _We had some fun, didn’t we? All getting a bit rote though._

It had all been rather mild for Ecthelion, given Ecthelion’s perpetual mouthful of envy like nails. Glorfindel had endured Ecthelion at his most vicious, when he spewed vitriol (or when he gloated over every sexual act, no matter how degrading, Glorfindel would perform for him, because Ecthelion was all Glorfindel would ever have and exactly what he deserved).

But Glorfindel had never expected it to hurt. And yet it had hurt. Ecthelion had grown bored with him, had moved on to fresh meat, and Glorfindel could not stop the curling of his heart like a leaf shriveled in the heat of a fire, left with only the ashes of inadequacies. Ecthelion’s casting away should not have had the power to make him feel used. But it had. 

It had been the most casual of relationships born out of a desperation to connect with another human being, and in the end it fixed nothing. The boy was still naked and alone in the dark, but now a layer of filth lay over once unsullied skin.

Ecthelion had only been the end. It had all just been Glorfindel trying to use the touch of another to plug up the holes he was leaking out of. It hadn’t worked. 

The revelation had crept upon him in increments, until this final slap that hurled the last of his self-denial away: bitterness had grown into a cancer in his chest, the focus through which he viewed the world, and his hatred was consuming him.

He _hated_ Irimë. 

He could never forgive her. Didn’t know how. He wanted her to _bleed_. He dreamt of grief finding her, tearing her apart like ravenous wolves. He could not let go of what she’d done to him, and he feared this was all he’d ever be. This bitter, insecure man gorged on shame and hate. 

He didn’t know how to fix himself. He was beginning to understand now, with the distraction of Ecthelion cut away, that he couldn’t crawl out of this pit on his own strength. He needed Fingolfin and Fingon, the hands that had set him on his feet, the light that had illuminated the path, to lead him out of the dark. Why had he ever left them?

“Well, I have returned now,” Glorfindel answered in a bland voice, unable to pull on a smile that dug into the peaks of his cheeks like knives. There had been nothing to smile about in centuries. Not since he’d walked blindly into the mouth of a snake, and not realized he’d become the meal until the jaws of the Hidden Way snapped shut behind him and smothered him in darkness and venom.

“I image you have heard.” Idril did not move to pull him into an embrace. She knew he would stand stiffly in her arms. Her arms never failed to feel like clinging vines around his body, dragging him down with pleas ( _Glorfindel, do you not know? Cannot you see how I much I lov—_ ).

“I have heard some ugly tales.” Even in the mountains rumors slinked their away out to ears, carried on the hooves of the rotating patrols.

Idril’s eyes shifted away. “People will talk.”

“Slander more like.”

She sighed, lifting her eyes to his, a crease pressed between her delicate brows. “Yes, there are ugly things said, but not all of them are untruths.”

“Which ones? The ones about Eöl being an Orc, Maeglin smiling when they tossed his father over the wall, or Maeglin being a secret spy sent by the enemy to kill us all? I may not have met our cousin yet, but I do not believe a word of these lies.” Four months ago, when the tragedy unfolded here in the city, Glorfindel was tucked away in the mountains and had witnessed none of it.

Idril moved restlessly to the couch, and ran her hand over the back of it. “No, of course those are not true. And yet Doom did enter our city that day.”

Glorfindel flicked his fingers, dismissive. “Gondolin has lived under the shadow of the Valar’s Curse the same as all the other Noldor. Doom was already here waiting with its hot breath on our necks. Most just prefer to ignore the scent.”

Idril shook her head, “No, you were not there and did not witness as I did. Fate laid its hand over Eöl, and he spoke a prophecy. I heard the Doom in his voice. Maeglin is Cursed. Everything he puts his hands too will turn to evil under them. He will be the architect of our destruction.”

“I may not have heard this prophecy,” if there even was one; he would investigate the matter himself, though with how wild the rumors and distorted the tale had grown, unearthing the truth would be a mess, “but we are all of us Cursed, Idril. And defying it is our only chance at survival.” Then, with a frown, “You have not spoken to Maeglin of your premonitions, have you?”

She looked at him like he’d slapped her. “Do you have any idea—but no, of course you do not. You have been away.” She closed her eyes, swallowing the shards of pain Glorfindel’s poor opinion of her had sliced through her heart.

“I am sorry. I was careless with my words. I know you would not have purposely inflicted harm on him.” Lies. She would have done _anything_ if she thought she was acting in Gondolin’s greater good. She had become as devoted to saving the people within it as her father had to saving its stones. She had never forgiven herself for what happened that day in the tunnel of the Hidden Way. Glorfindel would not have been able to forgive himself either if his actions had led to the deaths of 15,000 people.

Idril jerked a nod, and breathed in deeply. She circled around the couch and took a perch on its cushions, hands folding in her lap, back straight as a wall of glass. Glorfindel stepped forward to take the chair arranged facing the couch. Her voice halted him. She would not have wanted it to slip out so fluttering, almost broken “Will you not even sit beside me?”

His mouth softened from its stern line (the one Irimë had taught him how to wear like a second skin). His heart heard the note of longing for one who would never love it back, and knew it like a twin. The difference between Idril and him was that she had confessed her love of him, and his had never left his lips, no matter how many times they parted, almost, almost letting it slip out and into Fingon’s ears.

He diverted from the chair to take the seat beside her on the couch. But then she had to go and cling to him with her body that smelt all wrong and molded too softly against his. But no, she’d only taken his hand. It was the memory of the night she confessed her love, her eyes young and earnest, not a child’s eyes, but still young enough not to believe he could not love her back if only she _showed him_. Showed him what her lips felt like, and how her body fit against his. Clinging. Dragging him down, down with the weight of what he would never be able to feel or desire, and yet did not have the courage to tell her _why_.

Not then, when he had been almost as young as her, and so vulnerable and wounded. And not now after all these years, for she wasn’t the young woman she’d once been who would have cried but _maybe_ accepted him as he was. She was a woman whose heart had sharpened in her chest, honing itself into a spear of atonement that bordered on the fanatical. And this woman she had become could be vindictive, and shut her weaponized heart down, cutting someone out of it with a surgeon’s knife.

Confessing the way his desires blew could end two ways: her using it as a weapon against him in revenge, or as a weapon to have him.

She could take the confession of what he was straight to Turgon for the ultimatum: marry Idril and _fix_ his unnaturalness, or be Shamed, Outcast, Ghost, even his name stripped from him. Sometimes the life of a Ghost seemed a temptation, the chains of being Lord Glorfindel cut loose, able to yell out the truth in the middle of the square: I want to marry a man! Nothing has ever felt so good as when Fingon Finwëion touched my shoulder, put his arms around me, and kissed my cheek!

But Ghost was Outcast, and the thought of being reduced to a beggar at the door made him recoil every time. If this was another city where Outcast could leave and make what lives for themselves they could elsewhere, the temptation would not have turned over into ash in his mouth. But this was Gondolin, and there was no escaping Gondolin.

He let Idril hold his hand between both of hers, because she loved him –or rather the imaginary man she thought he was because she did not know the real one—and the thought of what it would have done to him if Fingon had drawn away, repulsed, after Glorfindel’s confession, stirred his empathy.

“You said I did not know because I have been away. What did you mean?”

Her thumb rubbed over the back of his hand, a caress. He wished she would not, but he did not pull away. “Aredhel’s death was a hard blow for Maeglin. He has not left his rooms for four months. I may wish he had never come to Gondolin, but I could not sit by while he suffered. I have gone to him many times, almost every day, and encouraged him to eat and come out into the gardens and sunlight, but it does little good, I fear.”

“Is he fading?” 

Idril shook her head. “I think it more that he _wants_ to. It is as if he is trying to will his spirit away, but instead of succeeding, he body has gone to war with itself. It is the Curse. It will not let him go, for he is its conduit, its wide open door into Gondolin after Ulmo wove so many enchantments around our city to hide and sustain us. All that work was unraveled when Maeglin stepped foot here, for he brought the Curse fresh from the unprotected lands in his blood.”

What nonsense. “Ulmo’s enchantments do nothing more than change the weather and conceal the Hidden Way.” 

It was true that without the Vala’s Power, woven like a girdle around Gondolin, its inhabitants would have found it a struggle to survive. These Northern lands could not have sustained the crops needed to feed them if Ulmo had not used the rivers and springs flowing through the valley to heat it until it was indeed a second Tirion. The crops flourished within the humid womb that knew no snowfall or winter season, only crop harvest after crop harvest. But as for the Valar’s Curse, the Noldor of Gondolin had escaped it not at all.

Glorfindel stood, freeing his hand from hers. “It grieves me to hear of our cousin’s suffering. I shall visit him. Now, I have much that needs my attention after so long a stretch away.”

She rose, silk skirts whispering about her. She did not lean in to kiss his cheek or fold herself around him in a hug. Glorfindel had held her hand. That was all he could give her when she embraced him with all the unfulfilled longing in her heart, her body begging him for more as her mouth had long since stopped doing.

She took her leave, and duties sucked him back under like a body chained to a sinking ship.

The next evening he ventured out from his house, stepping from its gates into the bustling King’s Way. He walked along the wide, paved street towards the King’s Square, passing Lord’s House after Lord’s House, with slices of gardens dotted between the Great Houses. Turgon’s Tower sparkled in the sunlight like crushed crystals, shooting its spike high over all the other towers and stories houses. 

He spent as little time in the palace as he could get away with. Unfortunately he was expected to attend the Council of Lords when he was in the city. Today, though, he headed for the family wing of the palace. The city’s bustle tapered down to the soft steps and hushed whispers of servants in the family wing of the palace. 

He made inquires with the largely ceremonial guards standing sentry at doorways here and there. They directed him to Aredhel’s rooms. Maeglin had been given the chambers across from her old ones. Though old implied they had been used for some purpose besides serving as yet another shrine to the dead, like Turgon’s Tower was for Elenwë. 

A guard had been stationed at Maeglin’s door, more stood guard at Idril’s down the corridor and Turgon’s double-doored bedchamber at its end. Glorfindel lifted his hand to knock, but the guard said, “He will not answer, my lord. Just walk in.”

He hesitated, but Idril had said Maeglin was struck down by grief. He opened the door and stepped through. Sunlight spilled in heavy sheet through the receiving room’s windows. The room was as impersonal as a guest chamber, carrying no touch of its inhabitant.

He crossed to the bedroom. As he neared, soft singing floated out. It was in no tongue of Elves he knew, and yet was unmistakably Elven from the fair voice singing the words to the way they slipped with the vision of starlight over his skin. He turned the door’s latch and opened it.

The singing snapped off like a broken branch, and the Wood-elf seated cross-legged on the bed, beside a naked man lying on his stomach, snatched back his hands that had been oiling the naked skin. The Wood-elf sprang to his feet, poised like a deer before flight, nostrils flared, eyes darting to the open terrace doors. Glorfindel had enough time to note the Wood-elf’s plain, worn tunic did not bear the symbol of a palace servant, before the Wood-elf leapt from the bed and disappeared like a whisper through the terrace doors, jumping down to the garden below. 

Glorfindel could have given chase, but the Wood-elf had not been causing harm. Indeed, the figure on the bed showed signs of a recent bath in the wetness of thick, black hair spread out over the pillows and the fresh, clean scent of the room. The only pause for concern was that the song had carried a lacing of Power with the intent for its recipient to slip into dreams. Yet Idril had said Maeglin was unwell, and Glorfindel judged the Wood-elf had only been seeking to lend comfort.

He walked to Maeglin’s bedside. His cousin’s face was turned away from the open door and the sunlight slipping in through the shut curtains that billowed out with the gentle breeze sighing in. The breeze not only blew in the calming fragrance of the gardens, it also stirred the warm air from the room. The valley was caught in perpetual summertime temperatures, and today was an especially hot one.

“Maeglin?” he called, bending over the still form. 

He brushed some of the dark hair away to reveal his cousin’s face. His eyes traveled over it, delighting in its beauty as he would savor a red rose. Maeglin showed his Noldo inheritance strongly in the delicate arch of his cheekbones, and the sharp planes of his cheeks. He had a lovely mouth that was softly parted now, asking for a kiss.

Here, in the privacy of this room where no one could see how his gaze lingered, Glorfindel could take his time savoring male beauty. The only other time he allowed his eyes to cling and enjoy themselves with the view was when he was alone with Ecthelion. Though even those moments that should have been freeing were not, for they were either spent enduring Ecthelion’s snipping jealous or in sex that never involved bodies lingering in the bed together after or hands lazily mapping the other’s skin. Glorfindel wished—but it was almost a relief now to think that he would not find Ecthelion waiting for him around a corner impatient to drag him away for sex that satisfied Glorfindel’s body but left his heart so cold and hollow.

His eyes traveled with a will of their own down the naked expanse of Maeglin’s back, the curve of his ass, the long line of his legs, even his feet were beautifully shaped. He tore his eyes away. This was wrong. He was not only a stranger to Maeglin, but Maeglin was vulnerable and unaware that Glorfindel was even in the same room with him.

He should leave.

His eyes flickered, as if pulled irresistibly by a magnet, to Maeglin’s nakedness once more. The Wood-elf had left the vile of oil in the mattress, the work only half done. Glorfindel’s fingers twitched. _He_ could tend to him, after all, Maeglin was his cousin.

No. He should leave.

But the Wood-elf had started from the feet up, only Maeglin’s back and arms were left. That wouldn’t be so very wrong, would it? It was just…Ecthelion did not like Glorfindel’s hands lingering on him or learning the shape of him under them. He liked Glorfindel on his knees or his back; he liked Glorfindel when he was taking pleasure from his body, and Glorfindel had understood that was how it would be and had not wanted anything more with _Ecthelion_.

His eyes strayed again to the oil. The thought of spreading it over that male back, taking his time to work it in, to learn the shape of it, was intoxicating. 

Maeglin was so grief stricken he was trying to will himself to _death_ , and Glorfindel was leering at him and wondering what his skin would feel like under his hands. What was _wrong_ with him?

He turned for the door. He reached it, intending to leave, to make the right choice, when Maeglin let out a little sound of distress, shifting restlessly in sleep.

He should still leave. But…should Maeglin be left alone like this? Why wasn’t there even a palace servant in here tending to him?

Maeglin whined. The sound was so forlorn and sorrowful it hooked Glorfindel behind the navel and tugged him back to Maeglin’s side. Maeglin’s face had creased, peaceful dreams fleeing before the hounds of troubled ones.

Glorfindel reached out and touched Maeglin’s hair, the spot of glossy darkness right behind his ear, and stroked down. He sunk his fingers deeper into all that wealth of beauty and carded through. Maeglin made a desperate sound, but it was not the distress of nightmares. He was trying to press himself deeper into Glorfindel’s touch, like a kitten seeking out a petting. It was no hardship to give it to him. 

Glorfindel petted his hair, his nape, creeping down to stroke the silken skin of his shoulder, the line of his spine, staring, fascinated, at the shimmering runes tattooed into it. He traced each one all the way down to the seductive dip of lower back. His fingers wandered away from the runes to brush over the little dimples just before the hill of Maeglin’s ass.

His hand leapt away. What was he _doing_? Maeglin moaned, a yearning sound, his fingers curled and uncurled where his hand lay palm-up on the mattress, like a baby’s hand grasping for its mother’s, or a man’s the body of his lover.

Glorfindel wavered between bolting for the door and not leaving Maeglin alone. He dared not touch him again through. He had proved he had no control when a banquet was spread out for his relishing. His fingertips tingled. His hands whispered to him of what that olive-brown skin had felt like sliding under them. His skin was so cold, and Maeglin a warm, strong body the little boy from the box wanted to curl up beside and press himself against, seeking heat, desperate for arms wrapped around his starving, cold skin. 

He looked away, jaw clenching. Maeglin shifted on the bed, arm reaching out, hand knocking against Glorfindel’s thigh where he sat on the bed beside him. Maeglin’s mouth moved soundlessly, face crumpled as if it would trip into tears any moment now. 

Glorfindel’s hands fisted in his lap. A wet sound tore out of Maeglin’s mouth, and he cried out in his sleep in a language Glorfindel did not know. It sounded like the starlight tongue the Wood-elf have been singing in. 

Glorfindel could not bear to watch and do nothing, even if doing something fulfilled his own selfish yearnings. He spread himself down on the mattress facing Maeglin, and, hesitantly at first, a slow slide of hands, wrapped his arms around Maeglin. Maeglin curled into him instantly, hands grasping fistfuls of Glorfindel’s hair, chest pressing flush against Glorfindel’s, face nuzzling into his neck.

“Breglos,” Maeglin sighed into his skin, and kissed his throat. Glorfindel stiffened. He should stop this now. 

Maeglin’s lips trailed up, and oh gods Glorfindel’s stomach clenched, lashes fluttering. His mouth turned towards Maeglin’s, open, starving, yearning so fiercely his heart felt like it would rip from his chest. And then Maeglin was kissing him, and Glorfindel did nothing to push him away. He pulled him closer, kissed him back. 

“Breglos,” Maeglin gasped, “Breglos.”

What was Glorfindel _doing_? He torn his mouth away, detangled his arms, tried to shove Maeglin back gently, but Maeglin clung to him. His eyes were open but fogged, looking into dreams or hallucinations. “Don’t leave me!” he cried, wrapping his arms tighter around Glorfindel. “Please, Breglos, don’t leave me here all alone!” He pressed frantic kisses into Glorfindel’s neck and collarbone, nails scratching Glorfindel’s back, but not breaking skin through the fabric of his tunic.

“Shh, shh,” Glorfindel petted his hair. “It is all right.”

Maeglin trembled against him, his storm of kisses abating to press a wet cheek into Glorfindel’s chest, curling up against him, “Have you come to take me home?” Glorfindel’s throat tightened. “Please, I am sorry—I am so sorry I left. I did not mean—please, let me come home with you.” 

Glorfindel drew in a wet breath, tears blurring his eyes. “Yes, I have come to take you home. It will not be long now.”

A sob wretched from Maeglin’s chest, and he plastered himself against Glorfindel. He started kissing Glorfindel again through his tears, mouth latching onto Glorfindel’s and Glorfindel did not have the strength to deny him. How could he shove him away?

But the sobs receded and the kisses deepened, hands roving over Glorfindel’s back, into his hair, and somehow Glorfindel’s hands starting touching again as well. And then Maeglin’s hips ground into his, and his voice was still so broken, torn by grief, when he said, “Please, I need— _Please._ I miss them _so much_. Help me forget. Just for a little while.”

“Shh, I will take care of you.” Glorfindel kissed a path down Maeglin’s neck, mouth learning the taste of collarbones and nipple. Maeglin’s hands sunk into his hair, lifting his chest up to Glorfindel’s mouth, back arching. 

Glorfindel slipped between Maeglin’s thighs, and took him into his mouth. Maeglin’s hand tightened in his hair, hips bucking up into the bed of heat, but it was nothing like the way Ecthelion knotted a hand in Glorfindel’s hair so he could hold his head still while he fucked his mouth. Maeglin’s grip both shot desire down Glorfindel’s spine through the roots of his hair, and held him with in place with a light pull. 

Maeglin released into his mouth with a cry, and Glorfindel swallowed, wiping the rest from his mouth with the back of his hand. He’d almost spent himself from just the taste and feel of Maeglin hot and heavy inside his mouth. He looked up into Maeglin’s face as Maeglin let out a soft sigh. Maeglin’s eyes fluttered shut, sleep pulling him under with a look of peace on his face, or at least sated contentment. He fell back into dreams.

He’d been dreaming this whole time. Lost in a hallucination. Half sleep. Not even knowing who the hands on his body belonged to. Because he’d been asleep. Vulnerable. Hurting. In _pain_. 

And what had Glorfindel done? Taken his pleasure from the beautiful body laid out on the bed, unable to say yes or no or known what was happening at all because Maeglin had been _asleep_ while Glorfindel was _molesting_ him.

Glorfindel leapt from the bed, and almost fled the room at once, but stopped to cover Maeglin’s nakedness as he should have done the moment he entered the room, right before he _walked away_. He shut the bedroom door behind him and slumped, boneless, against it. Shame and guilt dug knives into his shoulder blades. 

Had he truly fallen this low? Had he become the kind of scum now who preyed upon others? He buried his face in his hands. 

He’d known he wasn’t a good person. He’d done _nothing_ too many times. But this? Was he so corrupted that he would take what he wanted like those Noldor who preyed upon the Wood-elves, using their power to sate their lusts in bodies that didn’t have rights or voices or the hope of justice in this rotten city?

He no longer knew the man he’d become. He only knew he disgusted him, and he loathed everything about him from his cowardice, to his vineyards reaping forced labor, to his greedy, grasping hands that had imprinted themselves in skin that had never asked for their touch. He wanted to find the nearest cliff and throw himself over. Just end it already. Why was he still existing? Why hadn’t he finished it before he turned into _this_?

But he wouldn’t do it because a tinny glimmer of hope remained that someday this nightmare would be over, and he would get out of this hell and go home to Fingolfin and Fingon’s arms. Maybe then they could show him how to be a good man like they were.


	42. Chapter 37

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 37

“Come away from the darkness, Maeglin,” Idril had called, “come back to the light.”

But what was the light but a voyeur finding its pleasure in a show of suffering? And Gondolin put on quite a show. The light couldn’t resist peeping into all its corners, and fondling the marble that had stood silent witness to so many crimes and never groaned under the weight of blood, but licked it up with eager, white tongues. 

The light was not home and would never be it. Twilight was, that subtle lover, that dusky beauty. Her shadow arms wrapped around him and whispered of home. He had abandoned her in his naivety and blindness, refusing to believe the truths falling from Breglos’ mouth. He longed for her like a child longed to be cradled again in the warm safety of its mother’s forgotten womb. 

If he could just go back, undo what he had done. If he had never left, he would be at the forge with his father right now. He could feel a proud hand in his hair, hear the steady words guiding him, always, never letting him tumble or fall. Then they walk back to the house side-by-side, and Maeglin would slip into his mother’s room and press a kiss into her cheek. She would smile her soft smile made just for him. They would lie together playing with each other’s fingers as she told him a story of her family that Maeglin could not see all the holes and lies woven into because the Noldor had not yet begun their education of him. As the twilight darkened with sunset, Breglos would seek him out and they would explore each other’s bodies with the eagerness of lovers who did not yet know the other’s body like the twin of their own.

But time could not be unspooled, and his blindness and deafened ears led, on the pitiless path of an arrow through the chest, to his father and mother’s deaths every time. They were dead, and he had not even the comfort of home to console him, no Breglos to weep with as they linked their hands in shared mourning, not even the freedom to walk out of his father and mother’s tomb to seek the small comfort of his grandfather who his mother _promised_ would have loved him. There was nothing but the bars of a cage, and desolation stretching out beyond the curve of the horizon, promising him he would never escape.

And yet his soul did not snap itself from his body and follow his father and mother’s into death. It clung on, a stubborn thing still scrambling for comfort in this life. A part of him was not ready to fold up and fade into dust, for he had not been utterly forsaken in this sea smelling of decay and loneliness. Two hands reached out to pull him back to the shore. 

Nídon slipped into his room every night to cradle him in the lap of the Star Tongue, singing to him of starlit shores and freedom like leagues of woodlands in his lungs. Maeglin had thought it was Breglos come to take him home the first night, lost as he was in the fog of grief, warring with his body to just _let go_. “Breglos?” he had called, reaching out for the murky silhouette at his side. 

“No, young one, I am sorry I cannot give him to you, or your father back,” a voice had answered in the language of stars, “but I will sing to you and give you some small comfort, for you lifted my heart in its despair.”

The other hand reaching out to him had not rocked his soul in a warm lap as Nídon did, but she came to him with the promise that not all the Noldor’s hearts were blackened, and that there was at least one member of his family who would not stand back and watch while grief crucified him to death. Idril would sit by him, the sunlight spilling into her golden hair. He asked her to shut the curtains for the light stung his eyes but she did not, saying the sunlight would bring him out from the darkness. Still, she came and sat beside him, reading to him, and coaxing food into his mouth, feeding the part of him that wanted to live.

But these two hands had not been enough to untangle the noose of grief from his neck, for though they clasped his hand as he lay stranded in a sea of anguish, they had not the strength to pull him back onto the shore and set his feet on the sand. Or they hadn’t until last night. 

Maeglin thought it must have been a dream, but the dream was enough. It held out the hand of comfort, of a body wrapped around his, holding him close and offering him something to live on for. He had dreamed of golden hair, tender touches, arms cribbing him, and then a mouth shoving back the fog of pain with both hands flung out to knock back the walls closing in. He’d dreamed of Idril’s golden head bringing him pleasure, and her arms so warm around him they almost felt like home. 

He woke from the dream and rose from the bed, for he had found something worth rising for. The dream had whispered to him of Breglos’ arms, and how they would have found comfort in their grief together. Breglos was lost to him, but Maeglin longed for someone to hold him like that and give him a reason to keep breathing like Breglos had given his father, until Maeglin was able to feel the warmth of the sand under his toes, and start walking again with the strength of his own legs.

It had been a dream, so he could not be sure Idril would open her arms to him when he asked to wander into her bed. Nor did he know the customs of the Noldor when approaching each other for the seeking of pleasure. In the Wolf Clan the seeker traditionally brought a gift, either that first time, or, like Breglos, some nights after when he gifted Maeglin a sleek silver fox fur cloak he’d made for him.

Maeglin would fashion Idril a gift to rival all gifts, and hoped she would be delighted enough to look on him with favor. But not yet, he had neglected his mourning in the torrent of his grief. He dressed in the Noldorin clothes his mother had sewn for him which someone had been considerate enough to wash and not throw into the fire. He dawned the few pieces of his father’s gifts he had brought with him, and pulled his hair back in a long, high plume that declared him a warrior of the Wolf Clan.

Then he stepped out of his room for the first time in what must have been weeks, possibly months. There was a guard at his door. It was one of the men who had been there when Turgon imprisoned his mind. One of the men who led him through the streets to the wall to stand and watch, helpless, screaming inside, as his father was murdered. 

Maeglin took a deep breath. He let it out. He searched for forgiveness.

But they _killed_ him. They killed, they killed, they kil—

He closed his eyes, throat burning. His father had been murdered, and this man standing here, turning to look at Maeglin with a shocked face that he had emerged from his chambers at last, had stood there and watched. But maybe this man had been afraid, maybe many of the Noldor in Gondolin were afraid of being targeted if they spoke out. Or maybe this man had fallen into darkness, and lost himself there. Maeglin should pity such a man. What was hate but a dagger he’d pick up to plunge into his own heart?

But they _killed_ him. 

Maeglin breathed. Yes, they murdered his father, but would his father have wanted him to stab his own heart black, and lose himself in the darkness his father had fought and fought and fought against? Would his father be at peace knowing Maeglin had destroyed himself because of his death?

His father would not have wanted him to pick up that dagger. He would have wanted him to stay exactly as he was: Maeglin Starchild who loved his father and mother and reached not for hatred but compassion.

He opened his eyes and looked into his man’s. The guard had brown eyes and a dash of freckles across his nose. “What is your name?”

The guard frowned, “Dúlind.” He did not name Maeglin his lord or prince, but at least he had not spat or sneered.

“Well, Dúlind, can you tell me where my mother’s things were taken after her…death?”

Dúlind did not answer for a long moment. He peered at Maeglin with narrowed eyes, as if he suspected Maeglin of wanting to desecrate his own mother’s possessions. Then he pointed at the door across from Maeglin’s chambers. “There. Those are Princess Aredhel’s rooms.”

Maeglin could not fit the words of thanks through his throat. He looked away and crossed to the chamber door. He opened it and slipped in. He heard the guard’s footsteps walking away. To report on the prisoner’s movements?

 _Quiet_ , he told that cynical voice with a sneer edged into it. He was not going to plant weeds inside his heart. He was _not_.

(But they _killed_ him.)

He looked around the chambers that had been his mother’s before she was his mother, and saw only a stranger’s things. In the wardrobe hung white dresses fit for a princess, and jewels waited to adorn her white throat. Animal skins rugged the floor, and on the mantel piece were a collection of claws and teeth, all evidence of his mother’s love for the hunt. He found only one piece of her he could curl his hand around and feel the echo of home.

He lifted her bow from its mount above the mantel. It curved like an old friend in his hand even though he’d only shot with it a handful of times. He picked up the quiver of arrows he’d watched his mother whittle and fletch, and slung it over his shoulder. He turned to walk out the door and found Turgon’s broad shoulders spanning it.

Turgon’s gaze trailed over the bow and quiver, then snapped to Maeglin’s, “Put them back.”

Maeglin’s hand curled tight around the bow. The wood was warm, as if it still remembered its mistress’ hand. It was as close to holding his mother’s hand as he had until her rebirth. “I will take them as keepsakes, and wield them in honor of my mother’s memory.”

Turgon’s looked at him with a face remote as mountain tops. The silence grew thin. Finally Turgon said, the thorns tucked back under his tongue to leave only the flatness, “You cannot have those, or anything in this room. You may have her horse. Ride it and care for it in her memory.”

Maeglin wanted _these_ , but knew no amount of arguing or begging would erode that mountain top. So he turned his back on it, breathed deeply (the man behind him had _killed_ his father), and returned his mother’s bow and quiver to its resting place. His soul rebelled at leaving them shut up to gather dust in this room empty of life. Did Turgon imagine his sister would be pleased to hear how he’d silenced the singing twang of her beloved bow forever?

Maeglin turned back around and moved towards the doorway Turgon still blocked like the moon wooling the sun. Maeglin did not look into his eyes. He must forgive. He _must_. But he wasn’t ready to forgive this man, this killer, this jailer, this corpse king. He would though, he would. Just not today.

He had to stop in front of Turgon when Turgon failed to budge out of his way. He stood, hands loose at his sides, eyes staring over Turgon’s shoulder, “If I may pass?”

Turgon did not move. Maeglin felt Turgon’s regard on the skin of his face, inspecting him. Then Turgon withdrew a bulging money pouch and held it out to Maeglin. “Go purchase yourself some clothing in the market. I will have a tailor measure you for a proper wardrobe in a few days.” A proper Noldorin one. Turgon’s lip curled as his eyes lingered over Eöl’s craftsmanship. “And take off that Avarin jewelry. I told you: you must distance yourself from my sister’s killer.”

Maeglin said nothing as he took the money pouch from his father’s killer. His mother and he had brought little money with them on their journey, and he would never sell one of the few possessions he had from home. He did not refuse the money because even in this cage, it offered the thinnest thread of independence, even though it was fed to him from his father’s killer’s hand. 

If he did not take it and do as Turgon told him, Turgon would just send a servant out to fetch what he wanted Maeglin to wear. Turgon was the king and Maeglin’s jailer. His power over Maeglin was absolute.

Turgon did not move from the doorway. Maeglin breathed. He took off his father’s jewelry and tucked them safe against his heart. He could not bear to have them taken from him to curb his defiance. They were all he had left of his father. 

Turgon stepped back, opening the doorway to him. Maeglin walked through, out into the deceptive freedom of the hall. But as Turgon made to walk away, Maeglin asked, “Where are my father’s things? His armor, clothing?” Anything, even a scrap of fabric, he needed to wrap his arms around it.

Turgon swung a daggered look back at him. “I have told you: you must cut that killer from your heart.”

Maeglin breathed. “He is my father. Would you not want a piece of Fingolfin to remember him by, even if he killed your mother?”

Turgon’s jaw clenched. He looked away. The silence stretched like metal beaten too thin and brittle over an anvil. Then Turgon said, voice revealing no flicker of empathy, but he must have felt _something_ for he said: “I will have his armor delivered to your room. As for his javelins, they were destroyed. The rest of his possessions were left on his body when he was executed.”

“And…and his body? Was he given…tell me he was given Burial Rites, that he was not left—” For scavengers to feed on.

Turgon’s mouth tightened. He did not meet Maeglin’s eyes. He did not have to answer, the truth, the horror lay like a corpse between them.

“Am I a prisoner in these walls, or can I walk freely through the city, out of its gates?”

“You may leave the palace, and walk where you will in Gondolin, even out into the valley, but you do not have permission to enter the mountains or the Hidden Way. Those are closed to you.” And then, eyes sharp on Maeglin’s face, “You will not find his bones on the rocks. The body was taken sometime during the night after the execution.”

“Taken?” Maeglin’s voice punched out in a gasp. Someone had _stolen_ his father’s body? To desecrate it? Some sick vengeance upon the man these Noldor had never seen as a man, not human like them, but a savage, a Moriquende. Had they laughed and gotten drunk on wine while they committed their foul deed? 

Even caged in his mind, Maeglin had heard the muffled laughter as someone in the back of the crowd gathered for the _show_ traded jokes with their companions. Maeglin’s scream had strangled in a throat that refused to obey his commands and _save him_. A toss, a terrible drop, so long long long long, and then a broken, splattered body on the rock’s teeth. Then laughter, a crowd grown bored. The show was over, right? 

“Yes, it was taken in the night,” Turgon said in a voice that did not care at all. He turned and walked away, leaving Maeglin alone in the corridor.

Maeglin found a way out of the palace as quickly as he could, but stepping out into the sunlight that stung his eyes, reflecting off all the white marble everywhere, did not slip down his throat with even a trickle of bars loosening from his cage. He retraced the steps the guards had led him on, and returned to the place he’d last looked into his father’s eyes.

The place they had committed murder was beautiful and sterile; it reeked of corpses and cages. The Tumladen spread out like a green womb below his feet, but it was not the womb that birthed him. From the high walls, the cliffs of the Caragdûr dropped in an almost vertical line, so sharply were they cut into Amon Gwareth. On this side of the hill the city had been built upon, the Wood-elves had no dwelling, for the land was uninhabitable. 

He thought if he had had power over his body in the moments after they murdered his father, he would have flung himself over the cliff, joining his father’s body on the rocks. But not now, not today. The grief still choked his throat like sea water, and he hadn’t learned how to find his feet in the sand, but his hand clung to the glimmer of hope for comfort in this life.

He left the place of his father’s murder, and went in search of a market. He found the Great Market not far from the cliffs. He had not asked any of the Noldor splitting around his shoulders in an ocean of bodies for directions, though most had not given him a second glance, his face unknown to them and passing for a Noldo.

The Great Market was packet even tighter with bodies than the streets. Gondolin was not a city that sprawled, but one that compacted and built higher as its populace grew and the space atop Amon Gwareth dwindled. Every building he passed, even the houses, stacked at least three stories.

He purchased two sets of simple clothing, stretching his funds, before he headed for the stalls hawking gemstones and raw, precious metals. A necklace took shape in his mind. Silver for the base, and blue opal to complement Idril’s eyes. The silver was surprisingly cheap, but the opal almost cleaned out the pouch, for he did not want a single pendent hanging from a silver chain. 

The necklace he would gift her would lay upon her collarbones in links of slender rectangles of silver sheeted in blue opal. The geometric design at the necklace’s crux would be simple flares of the same silver and opal layering. The necklace’s unique splendor would unveil itself brightest in the sunlight Idril loved soaking her skin under, for blue opal swirled with shades of blue like a tropical sea, glowing almost fluorescent in the light. 

He must ensure he presented his gift when the sunlight fell on her, so she could gasp over its beauty. There was nothing Noldorin in the necklace’s design, but Idril possessed an uncorrupted heart. She alone of the Noldor in this city had shown him compassion and kindness in his suffering.

With his purchases made, he approached a woman loaded down with packages. Most of the Elves who now found themselves crushed under the Noldor’s boot originated from the tribes of Hithlum, so Maeglin chose to address her in their dialect. “Excuse me. Could you tell me where I might find the city’s forges?”

She stared at him like a startled doe, dark eyes huge. “S-s-sir, I-I…” She had answered in Sindarin.

He touched her arm with a smile, seeking to put her at ease, but his touch froze her. Her face drained of color. “I mean you no harm,” he spoke softly in language of the Hithlum tribes. “My father was of the Free People.”

Her eyes flickered down over his clothing. It was in the Noldorin fashion but not the princely wear Turgon had ordered him into to watch his father’s murder. His mother had sewn him this tunic and leggings from the bolts of cotton cloth his father kept on hand for her needs.

Some of the tension eased from the woman’s face, and she answered in the same tongue, voice no more than a whisper, as if they did something illicit, “You pass well. I would not have guest you were a half-blood. But,” her eyes darted to the faces milling around them, “you should not be caught speaking to me as an equal if you wish to continue to hide what you are.”

Maeglin’s smile turned sorrowful. An edge of bitterness he was fighting _so hard_ to root out stole into it, “It is too late for that.”

She gave him a pitying look, “The Golodhrim will show you no mercy if they discover you tired to hide among them.”

Maeglin shook his head, “You do not need to worry.”

“Ah. You are fortunate your Golodh mother protects you. So many others do nothing when they come for the half-bloods. But you must not flaunt yourself like this. Do not speak to us, pretend we do not exist; forget you ever heard a word of our tongue. You must do this or they will make things go hard for your mother until she steps aside and lets them take you.”

“I thank you for the advice,” he touched his hand over his heart. “Could you direct me to the city’s forges? I have an errand there.”

She told him to go back the way he’d come towards the cliffs, but turn off down the Alley of Roses (he couldn’t miss it; it was bedecked in them), cut north before he reached the King’s Square, but if he wandered into the Square of the Well, or all the way to the North Gate, he’d gone too far. He thanked her again, and departed. Their conversation turned over and over in his mind as he searched for the city’s forges.

When he reached them, his request to make use of an anvil and tools was at first met with bemusement by the smiths. They turned him away with shakes of their heads but no scorn dripped like hot oil over him, for they mistook him for a Noldo. He did not scamper like they told him to, but insisted he knew his way around a forge, and would not be in their way or do himself harm. Again they would have turned him away, but the commotion drew the master of the forges from his work.

The master’s arms were brown and thick as tree trunks. He shouldered through the other smiths like the prow of a ship slicing through the sea. He stopped before Maeglin, and Maeglin tilted his head up to meet the master’s eyes. 

The master looked at him for a long moment, examining him with eyes almost as dark as Maeglin’s own. His nose was broad and flat, his mouth generous. The master might possess some Wood-elf blood, but then not all Noldor were fair-skinned. The Noldor had found a way to distinguish their race from their slaves when they’d stripped the Free Peoples of the mark of their culture: every Wood-elf Maeglin had passed had had their ears pierced with iron hoops.

The master said, “I will not deny the nephew of the King a place in my forges, but if you have not the skill you claim, I will speak to the King and you can be sure he will head my words if I request your presence banned from my forges. For I am Rog, Lord of the House of the Hammer, and the King respects my judgment in these forges.”

Maeglin, now stripped of anomaly, received suspicious looks as the smiths parted to let him through. But he had a workspace even if it was out here exposed in the midst of them. At least they did not hiss mocking words at his back, even if their eyes bored into him. He set to the work of forging and ignoring them.

They went back to their own work, picking up hammers, tongs, and conversations, chattering away, creating a clamor. Maeglin’s shoulders started to twitch, face pulling into a fiercer and fiercer scowl. Why must they make such an unholy racket? All the noise kept jarring him out of his focus, and derailing his creative flow.

Back at home he could work in _peace_. His father and he only spoke when their forging completed, or when they lifted up their voices in the rhythm of a Forging-Song. Maeglin could hardly _think_ though all this noise.

His shoulders had hunched up around his ears as if to protect them as he bent over his worktable cutting and polishing the opal. A voice rode over the noise, digging between his shoulder blades, “What do you think he is doing over there? All secretive like?”

“Probably crafting more javelins like his Orc-father to murder us all in our beds,” another sneered.

“Do not tell me you believe all those rumors!”

“Well, look at him. All hunched up, a twitchy, creepy little thing. He gives me the chills.”

“You just like the attention retelling those wild tales gives you. I have seen you down at the taverns. And I bet you will nurse the tale of how the boy almost skinned you alive with one look from his eyes, just like you reveled in having been there on the wall when his father got the shove.”

A new voice said, close enough Maeglin startled and whipped his head around to find the Noldo peering over his shoulder, “What are you working on?”

Maeglin’s hands instinctively moved to shield his work from the other’s eyes. “It is _private_.”

The Noldo raised a brow. “No need to be so secretive. It gives a poor impression. Come, show us what you are making,” then, lower, “it will shut up these others, eh?”

But Maeglin did not uncurl his hands from their balls hiding his work. “I appreciate the thought, but I prefer to work alone. Undisturbed.”

The Noldo frowned, all friendliness wiped from his face. “Then on your head be it.” He spun around and went back to his own workspace.

Maeglin heard the one who’d called his father an Orc say, “What did I tell you?”

Maeglin’s shoulders did not loosen from their tight bunch as he uncurled from his protective hunch, and, slowly, began to work the opal again. He wanted away from this place, but had no means to finish the crafting alone in his room, and did not like the taste running away left in his mouth. As the necklace took shape under his hands, he could not keep it wholly concealed. Its brilliant shimmer drew the other smiths’ attention.

“There, I told you it was not javelins.”

The one who’d said it was grumbled back, “Well, it is not Noldorin work either. What _is_ he doing over there?” this last rode on a note of snoopiness. 

Maeglin’s nails curled into his palms. It was none of their business. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone?

“Hey, you,” one of them called to him rudely, “how did you shave the opal that thin?”

Another voice, “Careful, Aemben, you sound awfully close to _impressed_ there.”

“Don’t pretend you are not too. I have never seen an opal cut in anything but spherical shapes. So, come,” the voice addressed Maeglin again, “tell us how you did it?”

Maeglin did not look up from his work, “If you wish to learn it, buy some opal and experiment yourself.” 

His answer earned him grumbles and sneers of Dark Elves and secrecy. Did they expect him to hand over the knowledge his father had passed down to him as his inheritance as Eöl’s son on a platter for their easy pickings? (They had _killed_ him.) What kind of craftsmen were these Noldor that they wanted free hand-outs? They would first have to give him respect like the Khazâd and his father gave each other. Then they would have to offer him something in trade for the knowledge, just like his father and the Khazâd traded for the secrets of the forge. 

When the sun began its set, he cleaned up his workspace. He hadn’t finished the necklace yet, but he’d have it completed by tomorrow if he came in with the dawn. On his way out of the forges, Rog called him over to him. Maeglin went warily. Rog did not look up from his own work as he said, “You display a secretiveness that is not the Noldor’s way. If you wish to use my forges in the future, you will conform. Here, in Gondolin, when a fellow craftsman asks you to share a skill, we do not pinch it to our chests with stingy fingers, but share all with openness and generosity.”

Maeglin did not answer. Rog’s eyes lifted from his work to pierce him, “Do you wish to make use of my forges tomorrow?”

Maeglin nodded tightly.

“Then tomorrow will be your second chance. If you show yourself to be a hoarder of knowledge again, you will not be welcomed here a third time. Is that clear?”

He spoke to Maeglin like a disobedient child, an inferior, a dog to be trained. Maeglin breathed. In, out. He did not know what had made this man look at him through the eyes of superiority, seeing someone lesser. What had twisted the mind behind this man’s eyes, all these smiths’ eyes, that they would look at him and treat him like this? Why were the Noldor’s hearts so blackened?

But Maeglin looked into this man’s eyes and saw a man. He pitied Rog for the smallness he’d curled into, like an oyster locked inside its shell. He forgave him. “I understand now that communal forges and the giving away of knowledge if the Noldor’s way.” 

He turned around and left. He understood it was their way, but it would never be his. He would come here tomorrow and finish his gift, and then never step foot in these forges again. Somehow, someway, he would build his own in a hostel city of corpses.

When Maeglin had shut the city out behind his bedroom door and stripped the Noldo from his skin, leaving the clothes on the floor, he retrieved his father’s gifts and circled them like strings of pearls around him, like roses bloomed in a bed of frost. Then he sat naked and cross-legged on the bed that was not his bed because his bed was still waiting for him back home, but was his bed because his real bed would never be his bed again.

He closed his eyes and they came to him behind his lids: Father, Mother, Breglos too. He traced the curves of his mother’s face, felt the strength and shelter of his child-hand engulfed in the cavern of his father’s, and pressed his lips into the valley of Breglos’ neck. Ah, beloveds of his heart! Did he have the strength to keep being him without them? 

His bones felt like eggshells, his forgiveness wearing thin, bitterness rooting around his heart for a foothold. It was everything he could do to keep yanking it out again. He was so afraid one day his arms would fail him, and though his fingers bleed in their struggle and knuckles knotted, the strength of those roots would undo him.

“Maeglin Starchild.”

His eyes flew open, turning to the balcony doors which now stood wide. Nídon stood framed by a backdrop of stars as their light rolled off his tongue. Maeglin answered back in the language of stars, “Nídon, I greet you for the first time with clear eyes.” 

He rolled up off the bed to his feet. He walked to Nídon, holding out his hand. “I cannot fit my gratitude into words. You comforted me in the most painful branch of my life.” 

Nídon accepted his hand, and drew fully into the room. His hand slid tough and knotted with calluses against Maeglin’s, and his tunic bore the signs of hard labor and use. “It is I who can never fit my gratitude into words, for you lifted my heart from its despair, and shone starlight into a world gone dark.”

“You were one of the singers?” Maeglin asked, but already knew.

Nídon nodded, tears shinning in his eyes as he looked upon Maeglin as one would a long lost beloved returned to them, full of wonder. He lifted his hand and touched Maeglin, running his work-roughed fingers through his hair. “Ah, Starchild, you came to us in our hour of darkness. But in exchange for this hope you have renewed in me and the others whose hearts were lifted by your song, you have reaped only sorrow. Such has the world become that no light comes without the Darkness opening its jaws to snatch it away again.”

Maeglin squeezed his hand. His impotency in the face of the Wood-elves’ suffering in this corpse city bouldered into him. “Come, sit with me, and tell me of yourself.”

Nídon put his hand on Maeglin’s shoulder to stop him turning away to the bed. “Let me comb your hair.”

Maeglin nodded, and fetched the ivory comb his father had gifted him. He settled on the bed with his back to Nídon. Nídon’s fingers began working carefully through Maeglin’s hair, as if he thought it butterfly wings that would unravel under his calloused thumbs. “I wish I could tell you I knew your father, but I was a young child when Eöl Starborn was taken by the Dark Hunter.” Maeglin did not allow his disappointment to show and leaden this moment. He tucked it away, one more pile of ash. “But,” Nídon continued, “I did know your half-brother Denethor, for I followed him over the mountains and dwelt long in Ossiriand where he was king.”

Maeglin knew little of Denethor. “What pulled you from Ossiriand?”

Nídon stroked the comb through Maeglin’s hair a few more times before answering, voice tangled with memoires, “After Denethor’s death, some of the tribes forsook the shelter of Ossiriand as the Darkness rose. Some of us hoped to find haven elsewhere, others could find no peace in our land after so many had been slain. My mate and Starchild fell in the Battle Under the Stars. My tribe went north into Hithlum, and there we dwelt when the Golodhrim came out of the West.”

“Why did you follow Turgon into Gondolin?” 

Nídon sighed heavily through his nose, and his hands fell away from Maeglin’s hair. “The burden of this mistake has weighed upon our hearts like the body of a whale. Why did we come here? Because we were afraid of the Dark. We were afraid the Golodhrim’s swords would not keep it out forever. We had lived so long tormented by the Dark, harassed by Orcs and Fell-wolves, killed by our own who’d been captured and released back into our villages. We were afraid of returning to that terror that had us looking over our shoulders, poisoning our hearts with paranoia. So when Turgon told us he was building a place of secret safety, and gave many promises to entice us that he broke, in our fear we traded away our freedom.”

Nídon set the comb down on the bedside table, and gathered Maeglin’s hair in his hands to spill it over one of Maeglin’s shoulders. He took Maeglin’s chin in the curl of his fingers and turned it towards him. “When the sun begins its set tomorrow, meet me at the city’s Main Gate. I will take you down into our District. Wear a cloak to pull over your face, and clothing that will not draw attention to yourself –at least, not more than one with the face of a Golodh entering the Distinct already will.”

Maeglin’s fingers circled Nídon’s wrist. “I will come. But is there a reason you ask for it?”

Nídon nodded, face serious. “Yes. When they killed your father, they would have left his body to the crows, but some of our people snuck over the wall and retrieved his body.” Maeglin breath sucked in. He’d feared… “I will take you to where we buried him, and pass on what little there is left of his possessions that were not ruined by the blood.”

Maeglin swallowed though the tears of relief pressing against his eyes. “Thank you.”

“Make sure you do not miss the sunset. The District’s gates close for curfew when the last of the light flees the sky, and you do not know the safe paths yet to sneak in passed the guards.”

“I will be there.”

“It all comes down to what lord you serve,” Nídon said as he led Maeglin through the Main Gate and down the steep, high-walled street that cut through the Wood-elves’ District. “We do not have a say in what lord’s House we are contracted to. And once a House contracts us, we rarely switch. During the harvest seasons the lords pass us around, going from one lord’s fields to the next, but that is only a temporary loan. And when we are traded between Houses, it is almost always a curse, for it usually means you caught a Golodh’s eye, and they want to bed you.”

Maeglin’s breath strangled in his lungs. “They…?” 

He had seen the corruption, but not seen that it carved such deep ruts in the Noldor’s souls. How could they do such a thing? Did Orcs hide under their skin? How had they fallen into Darkness, and became Lost when they lived in freedom under the light of their beloved sun?

Nídon’s face turned grime. “Yes. Some of them do. The worst of them. And the rest of them do nothing to stop it.” Nídon jerked his chin at the first gate they passed in the wall and the guards loitering around it, speaking in bold, shameless voices as they fed off humiliating the Wood-elves lined up with their identification papers out for inspection, heads bowed, and bodies dragging with weariness after a day’s hard labor. 

Nídon wrapped an iron grip around Maeglin’s bicep when Maeglin made to surge forward as he witnessed one of the guards put his hands all over a woman’s body. “Leave it,” Nídon hissed in his ear. “You can do nothing. And if you try, you will only escalate it and make it all the worse for her. The guards ‘inspect’ for weapons whoever they like, whenever they like, but they will let her go if she holds still and keeps her mouth shut, and the same for the rest of us.”

Maeglin’s breathing drug ragged through his mouth, chest heaving. He covered his mouth, bile churning in his stomach, as the guard fondled her breasts. The other guards either looked away, as if if they couldn’t see it it wasn’t happening, or encouraged him with catcalls and foul suggestions.

Maeglin turned his face away, body shaking. He pressed his cheek into the cold stone of the wall, swallowing convulsively to keep the sickness down. Nídon used his body to shield Maeglin from the prying eyes of the guards lest they draw attention. “It is over now. They have let her go. Come now, Maeglin.” He tugged on Maeglin’s arm. “Do not make a scene. It was hardly anything. She will be fine.”

Hardly anything? Maeglin could not get the sight of those hands violating her body out from behind his eyes. Hardly anything? Maybe, after he’d lived in this corpse city as long as Nídon had, he would have seen such terrible things that it did seem hardly anything at all, not even worth a second look.

“Look there,” Nídon tried to grab Maeglin’s focus off the horror. He pointed down to the root of the hill where wagons packed full of field hands unloaded. “The work day ends with the sun’s setting, and those in the valley ride back in the wagons. The outermost fields, and the mine workers and woodcutters, do not return to the city with the night, the distance is too great. They have what homes their lords provide for them. It is like I said: it all comes down to what lord you serve.” 

Nídon hooked his arm around Maeglin’s and began walking again now Maeglin had stopped shaking. “I am fortunate to be a field laborer, and one who works Lord Duilin’s fields near the city walls. Duilin is one of the more just lords –in comparison to those to choose from. It can be hard life, working the fields, but still preferable to one serving in the lords’ houses in the city. If I keep my head on my work, I am left alone and fed better than most. At least Duilin understands that a man needs to eat to have strength for labor.”

Maeglin asked, voice tight, but needing to know, “Who are the worst lords?”

“There are many lesser lords who own small patches of fields or have a few servants in the city, but of the Ten Great Houses, Penlod and Egalmoth are the greatest curse. You can see their men at their work now,” he nodded at the guards. “But even their cruelty is surpassed by Salgant and his men. Salgant’s House guards the Hidden Way, and ensures not one of us escapes this tomb alive. Those men and their lord stopping seeing us as anything but animals and bodies to be used long ago.” 

Nídon broke off to steer Maeglin towards one of the gates, “This is us.”

Maeglin drew his hood back, and moved to take a spot in the back of the line winding out like a cobra down the road’s slope, but Nídon said ‘no’ said ‘you have to act like a Golodh now, or they will not let you take your sword in.’ Nídon had said he would need his sword where they were going, and told Maeglin to bring it with him.

Nídon stepped back from Maeglin, pushing gently on his shoulder blades, “Go on now. Celebeth will meet you on the gate’s other side.” Nídon turned and wound his way down the line of Wood-elves to the back.

Maeglin approached the guards. They left off their inspection of the Wood-elves’ passes to look him over as he came. “What is this, then?” one of them challenged.

“I have business in the District tonight, let me pass.” The guards grumbled, but stepped aside to let him through as Nídon said they would. A Noldo had the right to walk freely in and out of the District, but few ever came. Why would they bother?

Once passed the gate, Maeglin pulled to a grinding stop, feet rooting to the barren, rocky soil. Impoverished houses piled up the hill’s slopes like each one crushed the other beneath its heel. There was no marble here, just stones cheaper than wood with the mountains fencing the valley in. Color had fled from this place, dissolving in a rain of dreary grays and browns. The place was a dumping ground of the Noldor’s cast-offs: worn and patched clothing in the Noldorin styles wrapped around every body, stripping the Free People of even the freedom of their own dress, and scrap metal had been put to every use possible in a land where iron came cheaper to fingertips than fruit.

A dark haired woman approached him. Her cheeks were pinched and hollowed, but her eyes shone as she looked upon him. She took his hand, her own trembling. “The singer,” she breathed.

“Celebeth?” 

She nodded. “Come,” she tugged his hand. “I will take you to my house. Nídon will meet us there.”

Maeglin let her pull him along, gaze straying to the faces pressed down by the heel of misery around him, eyes dull. Others met his eyes with vicious glares, looking like they wanted to slip a knife between his ribs and bleed the Noldo-blood from his veins. Others trudged passed with wearied bones, but heads unbowed, backs unbroken.

He said to Celebeth, “Nídon told me you were one of the singers. That you were of his tribe, and were born on the Great Journey.”

She nodded, fingers curling tighter around his hand, “All, long ago now. But yes, I sang with you. I have not sung like that since the lion ate my daughter’s soul.”

A shiver ran down Maeglin’s spine. “What?”

She wrapped an arm around his waist like she hugged her child, and whispered, “The lion,” she pointed up at sky. No, up at Gondolin. “He ate my daughter until there was nothing left. One mouthful at a time.” She trembled against him. He put his arm around her. 

Maeglin pulled her closer. “I am sorry.”

Her eyes slipped away, unfocused. “The Golodhrim gave her to a bad man. She walked into a lion’s den every day, and every day she came out with one more piece missing. He ate and ate until there was nothing left.”

“I am sorry,” he whispered again, words falling far short. 

She drew back and touched his face. “Come, follow me.” She took him up a winding, crooked path that a mountain goat would have been at home on, and up to a ledge that cupped a collection of small stone houses. She led him to one, the metal door creaking open on its hinges. He followed her in.

There was a stone table, a stone bed a straw mattress had been laid over, a metal clothes’ line a faded dress hung drying upon, and a collection of Noldorin craftsmanship cast-offs: a beaten up pot, cutlery, candle stand, washing bowl. She pointed at the block of stones that served as her table’s chairs, and he sat while she rummaged around by her bed. She retrieved the treasure she’d sought, and carried it over to him. She opened her palm to reveal a russet braid tied off with a carved and painted stone bead.

He picked it up delicately, “Your daughter’s?”

She nodded, taking the seat beside him. “She was born here, and died here. She never knew what it was to dance under starlight, or the feel of a bow in her hands as she hunted the wilds. She never knew what it felt like to be free.”

He took her hand, pressing her daughter’s braid into the crease of her palm. “Not in this life. But she wanders free now, running through the wild lands, laughing in the waves, drinking of starlight. And when her soul walks housed again, she will experience all those things and so much more.”

Celebeth clasped his hands in hers, a tear spilling down her cheek. “I had forgotten hope; all was despair, death by degrees. I thought it would not be long now before I followed my daughter. But then you sang of beauty my heart had forgotten the shape of. And I sang, and hope bloomed like spring. But then the grayness crept back in, and I despaired. But now here you have come with the scent of spring into my house again. My daughter’s soul was not eaten by a lion. She is out there, far from this place, dancing in the arms of freedom.” 

Her eyes stared up at him as if he could save her, save them all, but what could he do? Was he not also prisoner? Grief-struck, and teetering on the brink of loosing himself to bitterness? What could he possibly do but sing songs that ended in screams? He had nothing but empty hands to give her. 

Nídon ducked through the doorway. He greeted Celebeth with a kiss on both her cheeks, and turned to Maeglin. “We will go to the house your father’s things are stored in first, and then up to the caves where we bury our dead. But I must warn you. At the house you will meet those who will want to gouge your eyes out. Celebeth and I will be there with you, and you have your sword, but these are men who have nothing but hatred left in their hearts. Yet going to that house will be less dangerous than the caves, for the Golodhrim do not know of the caves, and our people who are wanted by the Golodhrim for crimes hide there. But they have become predators. They prey on their own people as well as any Golodh they can ambush. They _will_ try to kill you if they get the chance. So be on your guard tonight.”

With that ominous warning, Celebeth and Nídon armed themselves with crude weapons made from the scrap metal and they left the house. They took the steep path higher up the hill’s slope. The houses grew fewer and further apart as they climbed towards the hill’s bulbous head. 

Long ago, Nídon said, the valley had been a lake bottom, and Amon Gwareth an island rising from its navel. The caves had been carved out by the lake water and tunneled deep into the hill in a vast networking. The Noldor had never discovered them.

Their first destination was a house perched upon a jut of rock. It was like a fortress, for it was impenetrable through any means but a rope ladder. That, Nídon said, was why this house, and others of its kind, were the gathering places for the those who suckled their hate on plots of vengeance. Most plots would never be carried out, but sometimes, when they could catch a Noldo alone and vulnerable, the Noldo would be beaten and stripped, money and fine clothing taken, and humiliation smeared on instead. Never killed though. The Noldor’s retribution would have been a terrible thing. As it was, these men helped the rest of them none at all by feeding the Noldor’s fears. The Noldor used the violence to justify their harshest laws.

When Maeglin stepped into the house, glares simmering with hatred scraped over the bones of his face, wanting to peel it off with knives. Their hardened faces were like looking upon bare, impenetrable rock: what was left of men after all the fertile, vibrant, soil had been stripped away. He pitied them, and they terrified him. What if he was looking into his own future face? He must never let the hatred take root or he would become like these men who were not living, only gnawing away at their own hearts, hurting no one so much as themselves.

Nídon showed him into a backroom where they had prepared his father’s body for burial, and left a little stack of his possessions. His belt and boots were not half as precious a gift as the onyx earrings Maeglin could still see flashing like black flames in the firelight, and his father’s favorite rings that he had wore in every memory of his hand wrapping around Maeglin’s.

From the house they climbed higher, wrapped in Elven-hair cloaks, the moon and stars the only light to mark their way so the guards on the wall would not spot them. The climb was long. They picked their way, searching for handholds, heaving up the steep incline. In the steepest places ropes had been tied, left out like a bridge across a river for them to walk up.

The cave’s mouth was a black hole they crawled into. Once they’d rounded the first bend though, firelight greeted them, flickering shadows across the cave walls. Men and women sat gathered round, eating from a communal pot with spoons. They welcomed the intruders at arrow-point.

Maeglin had his cloak’s hood thrown up, and they demanded he show his face. He answered their demands in the tongue of the Hithlum tribes, “Who I am does not matter, only that I have come to pay my respect to the dead. Will you let me pass, or bring violence into a rite that should be sacred?”

But they had no honor left, and cared nothing for the sanctity of the dead. They demanded payment from them or no passage. Maeglin threw down a copper coin, not a gold or silver piece lest they grow suspicious of how a Wood-elf came into such wealth. And such was the poverty of the District and these outcasts, that they only demanded he give them one more copper. He did, and they passed by without violence.

But Nídon whispered in his ear, “They will want more when we come back through, and will have had time to talk it over amongst themselves.”

Maeglin’s hand went to the place he’d tucked his father’s priceless rings and earrings. He did not care if they robbed him of what was left of Turgon’s purse, but not _these_. There was nothing to do about it now, so they pressed forward into the caves to the place the dead were buried in soft earth and returned to the Land.

Maeglin knelt down beside his father’s grave, and laid his hand on the mound of dirt. There were no columbines growing here in the dark. He wished there were columbines. The blue flower dotted the graves of all the Wolf Clan. His father should have had columbines. His father should have been buried in Nan Elmoth. His father never should have died.

Maeglin cut a braid of his hair, and dug shallowly into the grave to scoop enough dirt over it to bury it atop his father. He said the words of the Burial Rites, but they felt jarred and misshapen here in this foreign land. He wasn’t doing it right; he didn’t feel a connection to the Land or the dead gone before them. All he felt were the hollow fingers between his ribs.

Then Celebeth started to sing in the Star Tongue, and hooked the stars from the sky and brought them down here in the dark. Maeglin lifted his voice with hers. Nídon twined his about theirs until their voices filled the cavern with starlight. The last note danced from Maeglin’s mouth, floated on his lips, and dropped into the air like a kiss good-bye.

He stood, and laid his hand on his chest, over the mementos he had of his father. It was not enough. This heart under his palm did not beat with peace or a father laid to rest in a son’s heart as a life flowed on. Too much of him still wanted to spread his body over his father’s, arms embracing the earth’s soft hump like a body, and unhook himself out of his. But enough of him was stubborn, or maybe naïve enough to think there was still some way to get back home, that he would not.

They left the burial cavern, winding back up towards the cave’s entrance. Nídon and Celebeth whispered to each other of what was to be done about the outcasts blocking the cave’s entrance. They seemed such an insignificant matter to Maeglin compared to the immensity of his grief, and the seemingly impossible task of finding some way to use what little position and power he had as his mother’s son to help these people. That need took root in his heart, and he watered it. It gave purpose to a life drifting away behind a cage’s bars. 

When they reached the cave’s entrance, he knew what he would do. He told Celebeth and Nídon to trust him to handle this. He crept forward, walking the shadows. 

Anguirel brushed herself up against his mind like the curves of a woman’s chest pressing seductively into a man’s. She spoke to him of how she could drink their blood for him, but he snipped her snake-whisper from his mind. He would not shed blood. His father never would have wanted that for him.

He picked up one of the man’s eyes who sat ringed around the camp fire. He slid himself inside, smooth as a fish through water, subtle as shadows. He had never tried to implant his will, or muddle another’s reality, but he did so now: You heard something. Was that a footstep in the gravel outside the entrance? They must have slipped passed you. You need to gather the others and give chase. 

Then, harder, pressing down with a canopy of Power: They are getting away! Hurry!

The man leapt up and cried out to the others that they were getting away; they had to hurry and give chase! He bolted towards the cave entrance. The others were slower to follow, but one by one, some grumbling, they went to investigate. 

Maeglin flicked his fingers at Celebeth and Nídon, and together they slipped back into the moonlight, pulling their Elven-cloaks tight about their bodies.


	43. Chapter 38

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 38

One of Idril’s handmaidens told him Idril was in the library. She imparted the information after looking him up and down like a rat crawled out of a sewer. He looked back into her face squarely and clear-eyed. He was looking for the reason for her prejudiced, blackened heart. 

He had found, after what he’d done in the caves, that if he looked deeply enough with his sharp gaze, corners of hazy memories would echo in his ears, spilling out from weaker minds. But in this woman’s eyes there were no hurts of the past turned outward, clawing at the world with the pain inside. There was only gossip and ugly rumors and an absolute belief in her superiority.

He turned away and went in search of the library. He had spent little of the past few days exploring the palace, so it took him many wrong turns before he stepped through the threshold of the library. He stared, drinking in the sight. Bookcases climbed up the walls and rowed the room, shelves upon shelves, all brimming with tomes and scrolls. A host of scribes bent over desks, quills scratching, and sunlight tumbled in in great sheets through the tall, pyramid tipped windows. 

He wished he could plant all these books in his father’s house where he could curl up with his mother on her bed in the soft twilight, and read to her with only the sounds and smells of the forest wafting in through the open window. He walked to the first bookshelf and selected a book bound in scarlet thread. He held its weight in his hands, an unknown marvel, and fingered the title etched into its leather cover. 

He opened it, caught its scent, slid his fingers over the lines of Tengwar. He had never held a book before. He had learned to read and write Tengwar from practice exercises his mother created for him, and after, stories she inked down from memory. His father had owned no books, and his mother had brought none with her when she rode into the forest. The Cirth runes tracing up his spine were fashioned primarily for communication, not the storing of knowledge which the Free People passed down from mouth to mouth.

He slid the book back into its slot with reverence. He would explore this room with all the passion of unearthing the shades of an opal from its rough, but not yet. He walked deeper into the library, searching for her. 

He found her on a window seat, legs folded under her, slippers empty on the floor. Sunlight bathed her. It stung his eyes, but it would complement the blue opal of his gift. 

He studied her a moment longer before approaching. He had not seen her since he’d dreamed of her. He examined her now in the light of his dream, with hope for someone to hold back the blanketing grief with the warmth of their arms. In his dream, her hair was a richer, purer gold. He saw now her hair was a paler shade, and her curls tight and buoyant where he’d dreamed of waves. But her cheekbones curved softly, asking to be kissed, and her mouth was ripe and full as a berry’s curves.

She looked up from her book as he came. Her smile was not quite warm, but she did smile at him. He was relieved he’d prepared her gift in advance. Once she beheld its luster, she might look upon him with softer eyes. “May I sit beside you?”

She untucked her long legs, slipping her slim feet back into her slippers in a silent acceptance. He sat down in the sunlight. It was unpleasantly hot and harsh. 

He had a sudden fear that she would want to lay with him in a bed washed with it. His heart knotted with longing for home, for Breglos who would have shaped his body to Maeglin’s in the quiet, cool shade of twilight. But home was taken from him. This too-bright and hot light was all he would ever know now. He must seek what comfort he could find within it.

“I have not thanked you for your kindness,” he began, speaking softly, creating a pocket of intimacy between the two of them, shutting out the scratching of scribes’ quills and whispering Noldor walking the shelves. “You were my friend when I needed one.”

Idril inclined her head, lips molding into another reserved smile. “It gladdens me to see the darkness of grief has lifted its hold over you.”

It still gripped his heart in a vice, but he had grasped hold of the scraps of comfort he could find, and though the rope they strung to the shore was a flimsy one, it was all he had to tow himself in by. “I made you a gift.” He held up the small, folding box the necklace lay cushioned inside.

“Oh?” She set aside her book, leaning forward.

He smiled to himself, and opened the lid, angling so the necklace would catch a full glass of sunlight and dazzle. She was dazzled indeed, gasping, hand reaching out to touch. “It is beautiful.” She lifted the necklace, and fingered the smooth, polished opal.

“May I help you put it on?” he held out his hand.

She hesitated a moment, but then surrendered the necklace to his palm. He stood to circle behind her, and she scooped her curls from her back, pulling them over her shoulder and exposing the road of her spine and the soft curls on the back of her neck. He brought the necklace up, and laid it to rest against her collarbone. Its circular arms bridged the hollow of her neck to fasten at her nape. 

Her fingers touched the design at its crux that trailed off just before the swell of her breasts. His eyes followed the slender line of her shoulders. He picked up the mess of her curls, feeling their weight in his hands as he arranged them against her back again. Then he leaned forward to whisper in her ear, “Your beauty sings to me. May I wander into your bed so we may drink pleasure together?”

She stiffened, “ _What_?”

Maeglin pulled back. He had miss-stepped in some way. “I meant only to tell you that I desire you, and ask if we might lie together.”

She shot to her feet, spinning to face him. Her eyes were cold as a desert night. “Your words are _repulsive_.” Her hand flew up to the necklace. She yanked, pulling hard enough to snap the clasp. She tossed it away. It landed on the marble floor with a sound like shattering glass. “How dare you approach me like some common harlot on the street? I am the Princess of Gondolin!”

She swept passed him, skirts hissing against the marble, back a lance. She kept her eyes fastened straight ahead, neck lifted high, and did not turn another glance on him. The quills had stopped scratching, the whispers hushed for listening ears. Idril had done nothing to regulate the carry of her voice. 

Maeglin stooped to gather up his discarded gift. He spent a little longer than necessary with his head bowed there, hair swinging in front of his face. He turned wooden as the whispers started up again, each one looped around one word: Moriquende. 

He swallowed, tried to draw breath through the tightness banding his chest, wringing his heart. He had hoped…and for her to spit such words at him, she, who was one of the only people in this city to show him kindness, and the only Noldor, the only link he had had to the family in his mother’s stories, because Turgon was not his uncle and never would be.

He knelt on the floor until he could breathe through the knots of pain, and then longer until he could exhale the bitterness worming into the soil of his heart. _No_. He had made some miss-step somewhere and dreadfully offended her. Of course the Noldor did not go about seeking bedmates in the same way a Free Elf would. He could forgive her cruelty. Though any desire for her dried up under its blade.

He stood and tucked his gift into his tunic. That was the end of that. There would be no comfort of arms to hold back the crushing weight of this grief. But he would not stop pulling on the rope leading him towards shore and out of this vast sea drowning him. For his own pain, there was no comfort, but he wrapped the arms of purpose around himself instead. 

He squared his shoulders, put his back to the ugly whispers, and plunged into the shelves. He dug through the bookshelves upon bookshelves until he’d found the tomes of Gondolin’s laws. He did not know how he could help the Wood-elves, but the first step to take was learning the rules so he could go about bending them. And maybe, if he worked hard enough, changing them.

*

In Gondolin, everything looped back to lordship. Only the lords owned land. Turgon had parceled it out to them at Gondolin’s founding. Only the lords sat on the Council of Lords, and at that table the laws and ruling of Gondolin was decided. Maeglin had no power to pull even a single Wood-elf from oppression without a seat at that table, or land to harvest or mine the funds needed to ease the Wood-elves’ hardships.

He needed Turgon to declare him a lord of Gondolin, a lord of a city of corpses. He stood outside the doors to Turgon’s private study, waiting for the guard to announced his presence and receive permission to enter. He had come to bow his head to his father’s killer, because he didn’t know how to breathe without the stilts of purpose holding up his lungs from collapsing. He couldn’t endure years and years of a powerless existence, just floating along, his heart eroded with helplessness and despair until he could watch a woman molested in front of him and call it hardly anything.

The guard returned and gestured for Maeglin to enter. Maeglin walked into Turgon’s study to find Turgon sat behind a massive desk. The study’s walls cramped with books and maps. What surprised Maeglin was the lack of sunlight. The windows behind Turgon had their curtains drawn, muffling the light filtering in.

Turgon pointed Maeglin to the chair sat before his desk, face shut behind walls as ever. Maeglin looked into Turgon’s eyes and caught no echo of memories. The mind behind them was locked as tight as the expression on Turgon’s face. 

Maeglin had wrapped his hands around the weed of resentment and bitterness grown against this man. He had pulled, he had _tried_ , but he didn’t have the strength to forgive him yet. This man had killed his father and made Maeglin watch, helpless, as he was thrown to his death.

“You have a reason for coming?” Turgon asked in a voice flat as the heartbeat in Eöl’s dead chest.

“Yes,” Maeglin answered crisply, and untucked the map he’d brought from his elbow. 

He lifted it in a silent request for permission, and Turgon cleared a spot on the wide expanse of his desk. Maeglin spread out the map of the Tumladen valley and the mountains shouldering it in. The map did not draw the lines of terrain, but land ownership. 

He cut like a surgeon’s knife to the bone, seeing no need to waste both their time with dancing when neither wished to linger in the other’s presence, “I wish to establish my own House.” 

He let that lie between them a moment, feeling Turgon’s eyes on his face, but his own eyes stayed fixed on the map. “I have noticed that Gondolin does not make use of the mountains around her passed the first ring –but for hunting—and ask that my House be given leave to mine further into the mountains. Gondolin lacks nothing in stone or metals, or even many precious gems, but I have studied the outputs of the current mines and noted that the deposits of some ores and gemstones have depleted in richness over the years. My House would fill in that gap, and return Gondolin’s markets to the wealth of old.”

Turgon said nothing for a long moment. His finger dropped to touch the Northern mountains Maeglin had specifically pointed out, theorizing based on the yields of that region that pressing further North would reap the richest benefits. Turgon said, “It is well you have taken my advice at last and laid aside the Avar to pick up the Noldo.” Maeglin had taken care with his appearance today, and indeed, looked every bit a Noldo. “However, I forbid my people from wandering too far from the valley to prevent Gondolin’s discovery, and shall not withdraw my ruling. But,” he continued, just as Maeglin’s heart began to fold up with the despair of failure, of _helplessness_ , “I approve of your ambition to become a lord of this city.” 

Turgon paused, and his fingers traveled southeast over the map to tap on one of the mountains circling the valley floor. The entirety of the mountain bore the red paint signifying land owned by the House of the King. The crown owned a good third of all the valley’s land. “I reserved much of the upper reaches of this mountain for my sister’s hunting grounds. Up its feet terraces are cut for crops, and higher some orchards and vineyards, but much of the land was left wild and used only for hunting or lumber. When you kneel before my throne, swear fealty to me, and become the eleventh great lord of Gondolin, I will gift you a parcel of land as I did the other lords. This mountain shall pass from the hands of the King’s House to yours, and shall bear ever after the name of the White Lady in honor of my sister.” 

Maeglin forced the proper words through his throat, holding his teeth back from biting them, “Thank you, my lord.” He’d known he would have to complete the fealty ceremony, but his mind had shied away from dwelling on it. He would have to get on his knees and swear to serve the man who murdered his father.

If his words did not ring with sincerity, Turgon did not comment upon it, though the promised gift was far grander than Maeglin could have ever hoped to be given the son of Eöl. But it wasn’t really given to him; it was given to his mother’s ghost, and maybe to pad around a broken promise sworn at her deathbed. As if any amount of wealth showered on Maeglin would ever make up for what Turgon had stolen from him.

“What name shall you give your House?” 

Maeglin did not have to pause and ponder; he’d known the moment he set his mind to establishing one. “The House of the Wolf.” He was, and always would be, a warrior of the Wolf Clan.

Turgon scrutinized him a moment, before allowing, “Very well. Now, there is the matter of acquiring a suitable house in the city for a new Great House.” Turgon walked to one of the room’s walls and retrieved a map of Gondolin from it, spreading it over the one of the valley on his desk. He pointed to the main artery into Gondolin, cutting a straight line from the Main Gate to the King’s Square, “All Houses, great and lesser, have a house on the King’s Way. The House of the Wolf will need one as well to conduct its business within. However, houses already line the King’s Way from foot to crown but for slips of gardens between. The House of the Wolf will have to make do with one of the smaller houses. I will decide at a later date which of the lesser lord’s will vacate.”

Maeglin would have declined the offer of a house in the city altogether, but Turgon spoke rightly that he could not manage a House from his bedchambers within the palace. He would need to employ staff to assist him in management of the mountain, and more: he wanted the small independence offered of crawling out from under the palace roof with its guards and close proximity to the man who’d murdered his father.

He said, “Casting a man from his house will surely earn me his resentment,” not that almost every eye in this city did not already resent him, or look upon him with suspicion or disgust, “and I would wish to build a forge in my house. I cannot see the other lords desiring the clamor of metal working alongside their homes and gardens. Might there be a place nearer the city forges?”

Turgon frowned, but drew his finger down the King’s Way, through the King’s Square, turning north to run up the Alley of Roses. “This street would suit. It is affluent, already near the forges, and there are some garden plots large enough to build a house.” There were no vacant houses in Gondolin, no piece of empty land that could be bought and built upon. All had long been developed as the city’s populace ballooned.

The matter of the house settled, Maeglin asked the one that had sat waiting on his tongue since Turgon had offered him the mountain, “What of the Wood-elves who work the mountain’s lands? Are they included in the…gifting?” Passed from House to House like cattle. It raised gore in the back of his throat.

Turgon flicked his fingers like they discussed some trivial matter and not human lives, “Yes, the fields must be tended. And you will need laborers for your mines.” He went back to studying the Alley of Roses, pondering the matter of the city house as if it were the most vital in the whole affair. “The Garden of the Lilly has a beautiful fountain I would not see destroyed, but would serve the best for the house.”

“Then the house will be built around it. A courtyard with a remnant of the garden preserved within.”

Turgon nodded, the crease having worked its way into his brow smoothing. He seemed more grieved over the thought of losing the garden than having just tossed what must be hundreds of lives into Maeglin’s hands. “I will have an architect begin drawing up plans at once.”

Maeglin grimaced. The thought of living in a house reminiscent of the gaudy opulence of the palace repulsed him. “There is no need. I will design it myself.”

Turgon lifted sharp eyes to his face. “It must be in the Noldorin style.”

Maeglin was not surprised. “Very well.”

“And fit for your station. Have you ever designed a house before? No, it would be better to leave this to the experts.”

“It will be Noldorin and fitting for a lord, but I would have it in my own tastes, for will it not be my house? Yet you are right I have no experience in the building of houses. Is there an architect who will concede to my wishes?” He did not have to spell it out. His blood lay ever pungent between them.

Turgon let him have his will in this, saying one would be found. And then, just as Maeglin was trying to unearth some compassion for Turgon, wondering if maybe Turgon was moved by guilt, regretting his murder of Eöl (yet knowing if it was anything that moved Turgon’s heart, it was remembrance of wishes sworn and broken at Aredhel’s deathbed), Turgon had to open his mouth and say, “The house will need servants to tend it. I will instruct the other Great Houses to gift the House of the Wolf two Wood-elves from their service to yours. Twenty Wood-elves should cover your needs, and if you have need for more, you may file a request with the City Servants’ Management Department, and they will reassign Wood-elves to your House –for a fee.” 

Maeglin breathed. In, out. Passed around like cattle, sold like slaves. He grasped the rope of purpose, winding it tight between his fists. He would go to this _Department_ and make inquires over this fee. Once he had the mountain with its crops and a mining operation started up, he would have the power of wealth. 

More importantly, he would have the crops’ harvests. There was no law in Gondolin that said he must sell those harvests at the market or to the city’s granaries. He could funnel the whole of it into the Wood-elves’ District, and unless Turgon passed a new law to stop him, no one could do anything about it.

Once the news of Maeglin’s coming ascendance into the ranks of Gondolin’s lords spread, Maeglin called upon the House of the Swallow. Through he was received without sincere welcome, his coming was dutifully reported to its lord. Lord Duilin met Maeglin in the receiving room Maeglin had been shown into. The lord did not hide his surprise that Maeglin, a man he had never met properly before but no doubt heard all the rumors of, had come to call on him.

Maeglin launched directly into his reason for coming, reminding Duilin of the two Wood-elves serving in Duilin’s House who would be passed to Maeglin’s on the day of his fealty ceremony. He asked for Nídon, a laborer in Duilin’s fields. 

Duilin refused him outright, but before Maeglin could assume the refusal was motivated by spite or pure, ugly prejudice, he said, “You would have known, _Prince_ Maeglin, if you had made inquires before coming here, that I do not trade my Wood-elves into other lords’ beds. I find that practice reprehensible, as a man of honor myself.”

It was only Maeglin’s moment of speechless, disgusted shock painted all over his face that convinced Duilin when Maeglin stumbled over denial of any such intention that he was being truthful. The Noldor of Gondolin had shown Maeglin again and again how short the stick of their trust thrust in his direction, and how long the one of suspicion. Maeglin left Duilin’s house with the promise that Nídon would be _given_ to him. 

Then Maeglin braced himself and walked up to the gate of Salgant’s house. A woman scuttled over to admit him. She kept her head down, hair hanging in a curtain about her face, shoulders curled inwards, arms held close to her body like she wanted to fold up and disappear.

He stepped through the gate, and walked up the path, gravel crunching under his boots. When the door of the house opened for him (by another woman whose body screamed of horrors done here), he thought the smell of decaying corpses should have smothered him. The house did not reek, but its walls groaned and whispered of the evil deeds done here. Celebeth had told him of what she had witness in her long years chained to this house and its lord infected with maggots. He had walked into the lair of the lion. 

The woman showed him into a receiving room, and mumbled that she would tell her lord of his coming. She shuffled away. Maeglin stood rigid, muscles locked, as he waited for the lion’s appearance. What was it like to return day after day to this house that had murdered your daughter, and slave away (be raped) by the man who’d eaten her alive?

The woman returned alone, hands twisting in her skirts, body trembling. “My lord Salgant says to inform the Moriquende that he is taking his leisure, and will not receive the Moriquende. He sends no regrets.”

“Thank you for delivering his message.”

She ducked her head and hurried to the door, holding it open for him. Maeglin exited the receiving room, and then turned and strode deeper into the house. “My lord!” the woman’s fear bled all over the cry, but Maeglin was not leaving.

He strode down corridors, startled women pressing their bodies against the wall as he passed. He threw open doors until he found his target. Salgant was indeed taking his leisure. He lounged on a couch with a glass of wine, eyes dulled with drunkenness. A gathering of disreputable looking men with ugly thoughts in their eyes lounged about with him. There were enough women caged in this den of lions for them each to make a meal of two. The room flowed with wine, the stench of debauchery, and despicable deeds. 

Salgant hauled himself up from his couch when Maeglin threw the door open with a bang. “Get out, Moriquende, or I will set my dogs on you,” he slurred.

Rage like Maeglin had never felt thundered through his bones. He did not know what his face looked like, but Salgant’s blanched, and he scuttled back on his couch, babbling about calling his guards. Maeglin grabbed this toad of a man, this vile, evil creature by the jaw and punched his will into Salgant’s mind as he ground out: “You will give me Celebeth who serves in this house at my fealty ceremony.” 

Salgant’s pupils blew huge as raindrops. His mouth flapped as he nodded wildly. “I will give her to you.” 

_You will never put your hands on a Wood-elf again._

_Never._

_And you will throw these men out of your house._

Salgant nodded, eyes rolling in his head.

“You, Moriquende! Get your hands off him!”

Maeglin straightened and swung to face the men who’d shoved the women off their laps to stand swaying with drink. One stepped forward, eyes more focused than the others, “I will have you reported to the city guard!”

Maeglin grabbed the man’s eyes and forked into his mind, strangling the air out of the thought. _No, you will not. You will turn around and get out, and say nothing of what you saw here._

The man turned around and stumbled from the room. Salgant stirred behind Maeglin’s shoulder and began ordering all the other men out as well. Maeglin did not know if his tampering in their minds would hold. But he needed Salgant’s to carry through to tomorrow eve when he swore his loyalty before Turgon’s throne. 

He left that place of rot with one thought sharp as lightning in his mind: he would put an end to the evil smeared like blood and chunks of bodies all over this house’s walls.

His will held Salgant’s hostage though the fealty ceremony, and even up to the first Council of Lords Maeglin attended. Maeglin examined Salgant from his place at Turgon’s right-hand, but Salgant showed no sign of fear or hostility towards Maeglin. He showed little sign of awareness at all, for he’d shown up to the council drunk. Apparently this was not a shocking occurrence, since none of the lords slanted him a second glance as he wobbled into the council chamber and slumped into his chair near the bottom of the table, far from the king who sat at its head.

Maeglin’s own entrance had caused far more reaction. Some lords’ gazes passed right through him, as if he did not exist, but others lingered with resentment or contempt, which only heightened when Turgon gestured Maeglin into the seat at his right-hand. Maeglin was Turgon’s closest kin in the room. The seat had belonged to Lord Glorfindel, who now took the seat on Turgon’s left without a word of protest, but that bumped Penlod to Maeglin’s left and that lord did not bite back his grumbles. He shot Maeglin a vicious look. So it went down the line, the hierarchy shifted for all appearances, yet Maeglin doubted his words would have much sway with the king. 

The council launched into its first order of business. Maeglin listened in silence, watching the way the waves of power washed, and examining each lord. Glorfindel, sat across from him, was one of the lords pretending he did not exist. In fact, he seemed to be pretending none of them existed, or perhaps was lost in daydreams of escaping. Word was, Glorfindel attended only a handful of councils a year, and spent almost all of his time out of the city patrolling the mountains. 

Maeglin fingered the edges of Glorfindel’s mind, just the lightest brush to test its strength. No memories spilled into the mouth of his own to give him a taste of Glorfindel’s thoughts. Glorfindel’s mind did not possess the structured, carefully architected shields Turgon and some of the other Aman-born Noldor did, but it was naturally strong enough not to open to Maeglin’s gentle caress like a lover’s legs.

Maeglin’s sharp, penetration gaze moved down the line of lords. Egalmoth had been taught the mind-arts in Valinor, though how he’d learned the subtle art was a mystery. He was a peacock of a man. He’d strutted in with crystal-studded robes, just as he walked down the city streets, hand resting pompously on his jewel-encrusted sword hilt. He’d worn the wealth of a king upon his body in a tasteless display.

Ecthelion as well had learned the mind-arts, and shut his mind up like a fortress. He carried himself with unapologetic beauty, knowing he was one of the best looking in the room. He knew how to adorn himself tastefully, without Egalmoth’s excessiveness. He wore only a braided Mithril band about his brow, a white diamond at its center. 

Maeglin had passed him in the palace halls before, and every time Ecthelion looked right through him. Only once had circumstances forced some acknowledgment, and Ecthelion’s eyes had swept over Maeglin, called him ‘our little Avar Prince,’ and dismissed him the next moment, walking away. The words weren’t even sneered, that would have meant Ecthelion found him worth taking the time to sneer at. 

Maeglin continued as a silent observer until the last order of business closed. Turgon opened his fist, fingers uncurling to loose the reigns of the council’s leadership over to any who wished to grab them and mount. Maeglin reacted before any other lord could open their mouth. He stood. 

He needed to stand for this. He knew in all likelihood his words would be sneered at and brushed aside, but he _needed_ to speak. He could not sit by and do nothing.

He said, “The lords of Gondolin say they are the noblest of men. But a well of even the clearest water is polluted by a single handful of poison.” Faces darkened, but by the laws of the council, they could not interrupt him until he surrendered the floor. “So is the nobility of all the lords of Gondolin called into question when one of their own acts out vile deeds with impunity, while these noble lords sit by and lift not a finger to stop the one who poisons their well. How shall the lords of Gondolin be spoken of in the Ages to come? As honorable men? No. Because they have allowed the honor of all Gondolin’s lords to become a cheap currency, tarnished, and worth no more than the rest of the trash.” 

Some lords could not bite their tongues, and let out protests, but Maeglin’s hand swept out, grabbing a fistful of air. And, is if he’d yanked the air from their lungs, they went silent one and all. “You take issue with my words? Then you should look to the one who poisons you and root him out. Only then can you reclaim your honor and call yourselves noble men.” They would not be noble or honorable even if they cast Salgant from their ranks, but telling them he thought them despicable wouldn’t help those women trapped in a lion’s den. 

He flung out his hand and pointed a finger like an arrowhead at Salgant. Passion galloped over his soft-spoken words to send his voice ringing out, “There sits your poisoner! A man who even now mocks the nobility of this council by showing up so drunk he cannot even walk straight! But that is _nothing_ to the evil this man has done. Here, at this table, as one of you, you have welcomed an Orc and called him your equal. This man has committed the foulest deeds imaginable. He has raped. He has raped many. He has raped women to _death_. As long as he sits at this table, this council will be nothing but poisoned water that reeks with corruption. So I ask, who will second my vote to have this man stripped of his holdings, of his lands and house, and all the Wood-elves who serve it whom he has preyed upon like an Orc its thralls?”

He did not expect one voice to answer. He was faceless, or he was bug to be brushed off, or he was neck to be dominated, or he was body to be bruised and broken and _taught its place_. He was not voice. He was not equal. He was not one of them that they would take shame into their hearts from words cast from his mouth.

The silence churned and swelled to its crest, and seemed it would turn over its rotting underbelly in the next heartbeat and sweep his words away like footprints in the sand no mark left to witness their even having been spoken, like dead fish washed up on a beach. Worthless, powerless things. But into that silence a voice spoke, a chair pushed back, a body stood, golden hair braided severely back from its face with cheeks flushed, a wild color bursting across their bones, like the speaker had drunk to excess, or flew high on emotion. Glorfindel said, “I second this motion.” 

Duilin stood, and declared as he had to Maeglin that he was an honorable man and would not see the lords of Gondolin’s name smeared by Salgant’s foulness. Ecthelion stood next, said little, but one more lord standing cast a shadow over those seated. Galdor and Rog pushed back their chairs to stand. At that mark those who sat felt pressured to stand and speak words severing themselves from Salgant. To hear them speak, one would think they had never known of Salgant’s true nature until this day. They were quick to cast Salgant into the role of Gondolin’s villain. He alone being responsible for every evil deed committed in this valley of corpses.

Salgant was not so drunk he held his silence, but when he stood to protest, he fumbled in his haste, and with his mind impaired, could not catch his balance before he crashed to the floor. The lords pretended he did not exist. By evening they would be pretending they had never spoken to him or dinned at his house, for they were noble men whose pure hearts had warned them against him.

The final judgment to strip Salgant of his lands and lordship passed to Turgon. Maeglin’s heart beat like bird wings in his throat. The impossible now sat upon his fingertips. 

Turgon motioned them all to sit, then gave his verdict, “The crimes Lord Salgant has been accused of are great indeed. What have you to say for yourself, Lord Salgant? Have you ever taken another against their will?”

Salgant struggled up from his tangle on the floor. “No, my king! Never!”

Maeglin’s jaw clenched, stomach churning. Would Salgant’s word, weighed against Maeglin’s, be judged enough to sweep the whole matter under the rug?

Turgon rested his heavy gaze on Salgant, and Maeglin could not determine if Turgon had known of Salgant’s crimes before this day, or if he even believed the accusations now. Turgon traced the shape of his mouth, brows knotted. “The matter will be investigated, and if these accusations prove true, Lord Salgant will be stripped of his title, lands, holdings, and servants, as is the will of the council. However, Lord Salgant has served Gondolin with loyalty for many years. The House of the Harp shall endure under new lordship, for it has not quailed in its heavy task of guarding the Hidden Way, and Lord Salgant will be demoted to the rank of Captain of the House of the Harp –so long as he performs his duty with a sound mind. Let this be a warning to you, Lord Salgant, to refine your behavior.”

“And Lord Salgant’s lands?” Penlod asked. “How shall they be distributed?” Ah, greed.

But Turgon dismissed Penlod with a twist of his fingers, “His lands will return to the crown.”

And so a man who had raped women, some even to death, was not sentenced to death and thrown from the walls as Eöl had been. He was not even Outcast. His affluence and power was simply downgraded. 

Maeglin left his first council with sickness slicking the sides of his stomach, and bitterness sniffing about his heart for a root. He cut it off with the knowledge that _something_ had been accomplished, and not a small thing for the Wood-elves who had suffered under Salgant’s control, but his hands grew cramped and bloody from all the weeds he had to keep pulling and pulling and pulling. He did not know how many more he could uproot before they took hold and choked Maeglin Starchild’s heart black with death.

Turgon accepted the testimonies of the women in Salgant’s house. Maeglin doubted the women would have had been able to speak the truth of what Salgant had done if they had not been brought to Turgon in private as a group. They found their voices when cupped in the hand of their collective voice.

But the hope that had become belief in Celebeth’s eyes that Maeglin would save them all, pressed upon him with the heaviness of a mountain, of the impossible. The suffering staring into his face staggered him. He was just one man, rolled under the wagon wheels of grief, and tripping over roots of bitterness. 

He sought to escape her eyes and that light in them that she was feeding the other Wood-elves now bound to the House of the Wolf, passing it into their mouths to crack their molars on its leathery skin. No soft bread, no sweet pastry, just the tough reality of his two hands. He only had two hands. He was only one man.

He left the city and their soon-to-be-disillusioned-eyes, to ride out to the White Lady, and inspect his mountain. He rode his mother’s horse. Thala flew down the valley’s east road, high on the freedom of a long ride. He had had yet to take her more than an hour’s exercise from the city walls. He simply had too much to occupy him. But better a day overflowing, then a life drifting away behind his prison bars.

He wound a slow path up the mountain, inspecting each field to take the measure of its Noldo overseer. According to Gondolin’s laws, a Wood-elf could not act as a field’s overseer, but Maeglin had no intention of leaving the Wood-elves now in his care under a Noldo’s boot. He needed a loophole to the laws. He would find one, or create one. 

And yet the thought of riding back to the city, leaving these Wood-elves laboring in fields he now owned crippled him. He couldn’t do it. But what else could he do?

He broke out of the orchards and into the wild forests wrapping a sizable grip around the mountain, consuming at least half in its fist. He let Thala run free. He breathed in the crisp air, imagining it tasted the same in his mother’s mouth: a stale freedom that clogged up his lungs with its false glitter. He was still a prisoner.

The weight of his tied hands crunched his vertebrae. What would he do about the overseers? Or the fact that even though all the Wood-elves in his House would be laboring not for the Noldor’s benefit but their own people’s, they still labored without choice? How was he to ease all this suffering when he could not even free the Wood-elves under his own care?

He dismounted at a stream gurgling its way down the mountain side, and sat on the backs of his heels, staring down at the green valley below. Up here the net of Ulmo’s enchantments broke, and the air escaped the cloistering heat of the valley. 

He wanted to go home. He wanted to return to the person this valley had strangled to death with the hands of grief and bitterness. He wanted his mother and father. 

He buried his face in the crook of his elbow, and tears shook his body. He missed them so much. And he was scared, he was scared, Father, scared that when he met them again they would not know the person he had become.

The soft pad of an animal brought his head snapping up and hand to his sword’s hilt. Two sets of gold-velvet eyes met his. A keen stripped his throat, and they whined, as if mourning with him. 

He held out a trembling hand and Thinfin and Morfin loped over to burying their wet noses into it. They sniffed him, seeking into his pockets and cupped hands as if they would discover their master hidden within. Maeglin sunk his fingers into their fur, and pressed his face into their necks. They licked the tears from his face, snuffled into his hair, and bumped their noses against his chest. They smelt like home.

He mounted up, and snapped his fingers, pointing to his heel. They followed. 

When he’d left the wild forest behind, returning to fields, he sent out word over the mountain for every Wood-elf to assemble. They did, and he commanded the Noldor overseers hovering around to leave them. They obeyed begrudgingly, grumbling of how things were done when the king owned the mountain. 

Maeglin did not know how to help the Wood-elves, but they would know best their needs and desires. So, to the fear and astonishment of the Wood-elves, he probed their hearts. And, after climbing the hunchback of their fears, together they began unknotting the many basketfuls of snags in the long, jagged trail towards freedom (or as close as they would come in this valley of corpses).

He returned to the city lighter, with two wolves running at his horse’s hooves, and yet with pockets bulging with a thousand needs and desires he did not know if he would ever be able to meet. 

The next evening, after the last of the sunlight crept out of the sky, he left the palace library he had taken to haunting and scouring for loopholes and escape routes from one law or another. The House of the Wolf had no house of its own yet as the construction was still underway, but Maeglin had rented the rooms above a shop rimming the Great Market to house the twenty city-dwelling Wood-elves under his care. 

According to the laws of Gondolin, the servants of a lord could dwell in Gondolin proper rather than returning to the District. A servant might be needed at all hours of the night. Maeglin used this law to pull the twenty Wood-elves from the rank poverty of the District (if they wanted, which all had, even though it meant tighter quarters until the house was finished).

Maeglin checked in on them every evening. Nídon and Celebeth, as well as some of the others, insisted on assisting him with his work as best they could, but none of them read Tengwar, nor could they make inquires for him at one Department or the next as he gathered the evidence he needed to present at council. Nídon had said the shortage of food was the greatest need, and the others agreed. Maeglin had set himself the task of trying to convince greedy lords who saw the Wood-elves laboring in their fields and houses more as beasts than humans to pry open their hands grasped tight around Gondolin’s food supply and feed more of its precious store into Wood-elf mouths.

Maeglin traveled his usual path, picking side-streets that would cut the distance. With the moon ridding the sky, the streets’ crowds had thinned, but not dispersed entirely. He rounded a corner, passing through the light of an open tavern door, then back into the night’s darkness. 

His head turned at the sound of someone emerging from the alleyway at the tavern’s back. Three cloaked and hooded men stepped out almost into his path. He stepped back. They followed. He turned and found himself hemmed in by three more hooded figures. 

He made a dash for the other side of the street where the roof hung low enough to leap up and escape on the rooftops, but they grabbed him, one covering his mouth with a hand to muffle any screams (Maeglin hadn’t even thought to call for help). They pinned his arms and dragged him into the shadows of the alleyway. 

He fought, but there were too many hands. He didn’t have his sword, or he would have used it to threaten them, and as for his knives, they filched them. Maybe if he’d drawn one when they first closed in he could have driven them back. 

They all wore hoods with handkerchiefs of dark fabric tied over their lower faces. They didn’t say anything or make any demands, they just started beating him. He cried out as their kicks and fists landed blows, but no one came to help him. The noise from the tavern probably muffled the sounds of his pain (of maybe eyes peeked out of windows and decided to do nothing).

He curled into a ball, arms trying to protect his head. His back felt like it had been rolled over by a wagon. The beating eased up, but before he could think of escaping, a hand knotted in his necklace from behind, twisting it so tight his fingers scratched at his throat, gasping against the strangulation. 

The hand fisting his necklace pulled him like a dog on lash. His back arched, trying to escape the pressure on his throat. A voice hissed in his ear, “You forget your place again, Moriquende, and it won’t be a beating we give you. Keep your mouth _shut_ , and your head _down_. This is your only warning.” 

With one last vicious twist, the hand snapped the necklace, sending jet beads flying onto the alley’s stones, rolling away into cracks and dark corners. His attackers melted into the shadows, leaving him crumpled and gasping for breath. 

His throat _burned_. He touched the skin gingerly, feeling the places it had broken.

He lay on the dirty street, sucking in breaths until he had the strength to uncurl. There, fallen onto the stones at his knees, was the central design of the jet necklace still intact. Gently, as if it were his father’s hand he cradled, he picked it up and knotted the two broken ends together. Then he crawled on his hands and knees, wiggling his fingers into cracks and dark corners until he’d collected every bead he could find. He feared there were more dropped too far into the cracks to reach. 

He didn’t have all the pieces of the necklace his father had gifted him, his favorite necklace, the one he had almost slept with since he’d been fifteen, so often did he wear it. His father had made it for him. Each piece of jet had been carved by his father’s hands. He couldn’t find all the beads. How was he going to put it back together again? It wouldn’t be the same if every bead had not been carved by his father’s hands.

His hands, cupped with beads, caught the first of his tears. He bit his lip, breathing deeply. He would not cry in this forsaken alleyway when his attackers could still be watching from the shadows. He made a pool out of the bottom of his tunic, and carefully poured the beads in before fisting it at its neck. Then he stood up and limped out of the alley. 

The house he’d rented wasn’t far. He made his way there, wiping as much blood as he could from his face with his tunic sleeve. There was no hiding the fact he’d been attacked though. But he would rather the Wood-elves see than the eyes at the palace ever watching him like he carried a disease or a knife to plunge into their backs.

At the door of the house he paused to gather himself. Well? Did he forgive them _now_? But this was nothing , _nothing_ , to what they had already done. They had killed his father. They had sat by while women were raped to death, and some had done the raping. Maybe even the men who had attacked him tonight. So, did they deserve his forgiveness now? Of course not. No one ever deserved forgiveness; it wouldn’t be forgiveness if the deed done was excusable. 

He opened his tunic and stared at the remains of the necklace his father had made him. There was bitterness, even hatred sliding into the palm of his hand with the cold metal of a dagger. Would he let it plunge into his heart? No.

_No._

He closed his eyes and breathed. No. Those men were pitiable. They were the kind of men with only darkness in their hearts. They lost themselves to it, and committed atrocities. They were the kind of men who had nothing but their darkness that hounded them, gnawing at their minds, peace ever eluding their grasp. Their existence was one without light, and so he pitied them.

He did not hate them, but while for himself he could forgive, the long shadow of atrocities they had committed before this night stretched itself over his heart. Had they been men Salgant entertained at his house where they had done evil deeds, or one of the guards violating Wood-elf bodies? How could such as that be forgiven? How?


	44. Chapter 39

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 39

Maeglin had made too many enemies. But who had held out their hand in friendship? It was hit back, or watch the Noldor use his people’s bent spines as their footstools, slurping up the beads of their sweat to feast upon, and licking the juices off their fingertips.

The White Lady’s apple harvest had ripened first, and Maeglin carted every wagonload his people had plucked from the branches into the District. He had the humbling joy of watching teeth close on sweet flesh they had not tasted in so long their tongues had begun to wonder if the memories were but dreams. 

The Noldor had thrown a fit. The apple prices had been high in the markets that harvest, and run dry before the Noldor had all gotten their fill, and they couldn’t have that, now could they? With the cruel, selfishness of children denied a treat, they punished the Wood-elves for having the audacity to eat _their_ apples. They punished them with hunger. Lords had cut rations, and pressured other lords to do the same, until almost every lord in the city had banded together to teach the Wood-elves what happened when they stole from their masters’ tables. 

And they whined to Turgon of their lost apple pies and cider, so he summoned Maeglin and told him at least half of his harvests must be sold in the markets or to the King’s House. The decision was final, no argument, shut his mouth.

Even though his people would now labor to fill Noldor bellies, it would have been endurable since they received the profit from the sale. But it wasn’t, because after Maeglin had sold half the peach harvest as he’d been ordered, he tried to purchase grain. The lords hiked up the prices, charging him a thievish amount. So Maeglin hit back. When his vineyards ripened, he dutifully took half the yield to the markets where he charged the Noldor thievish prices to get their hands on his grapes.

The lords had, predictably, run off to Turgon to make him punish Maeglin for daring to swing back. Turgon intervened, putting an end to the war. The House of the Wolf would now sell its harvests to the King’s House and receive fair payment. In exchange, the city granaries would sell to Maeglin at a fair price (as long as Maeglin did not try to buy too much, couldn’t have a Noldo missing a single crumb from their greedy mouths).

Maeglin’s people were provided for, but now he sat within a sea of enemies (not that most of these lords would have heeded a word from his mouth before their War of the Harvests). His eyes strayed to the chair directly across from him. Empty. Glorfindel had not attended a council since he’d cast his voice in with Maeglin’s and took the first step to what Maeglin had thought was hope, before he’d learned that nothing much had changed with Salgant’s ousting. Glorfindel had not been in the city for months. He was off on another mountain patrol.

There was no voice lifting to second Maeglin’s proposal now, though this time he’d come prepared with charts and graphs demonstrating exactly how a shortage of food affected a body’s ability to perform hard labor. Nídon and he had spent weeks preparing the research Maeglin had spent _months_ gathering. He had built a solid case, and presented it cleverly, speaking of Gondolin’s greater good, of how the city might further prosper with richer crop harvests. All these lords had had to do was possess a little human decency. 

But that was asking too much. They had no interests but their own –and short-sighted ones at that. They saw only the extra cost of feeding the Wood-elves more, refusing to believe Maeglin’s research, or worse, saying those fields that had reaped lesser harvests were the Wood-elves’ fault for laziness, and maybe those lords should take stricter measures.

Maeglin turned to Turgon, desperate, seeking the help of his father’s murderer. Turgon could at least be reached when approached on the careful steps of Gondolin’s best interests. Maeglin feared his face betrayed him as he urged Turgon to consider the good a small sacrifice could yield. Turgon looked at him a long moment. Maeglin knew now his eyes were pleading, and yet could not stop himself, for cheeks carved out by hunger danced shadows behind his eyes. 

Then Turgon held out his hand, palm up, and Maeglin’s pulse leaped in his throat, maybe—“Give me you research. I will consider it further at a later time.” 

No, he wouldn’t. But Maeglin handed it over, and watched Turgon set it aside, never to be touched again. He’d thought, for one slice of a moment, that Turgon’s heart had softened, that maybe he’d been moved by Maeglin’s plea or some shred of forgotten conscience. 

Forgiveness had glimmered, not within plucking distance, but drifting closer. He _wanted_ to forgive Turgon. Turgon had murdered his father, and no amount of regret would ever change that, but if Turgon had regretted, if he had come to Maeglin stricken by remorse, begging for forgiveness, Maeglin would have found it in himself. He was sure of it. But Turgon kept trampling over all Maeglin’s efforts with his Noldor heels, and Maeglin’s fingers were _bleeding_ , his knuckles aching from all the weeds he uprooted and uprooted again. Why couldn’t Turgon just be a decent human being _one time_?

Maeglin left the council with failure twisted up his spine. He walked from the palace and into the city streets, making his way to the House of the Wolf. He couldn’t stop seeing the fullness of Noldor’s cheeks, the tidiness of their fresh-spun clothing, the jewels strung through their hair. The city marble streets had been swept clean enough to shine by Wood-elf servants. This city of corpses, this people of paper-skin faces with maggots crawling behind their smiles. This city reeked fouler than the poverty-stricken one under their boots. 

He reached his doorstep and walked into the cool twilight of his house. He closed the door behind him with a breath of relief to be out of the city’s harsh glare and smell of decay. Here, in the House of the Wolf, they had built a quiet, fragrant sanctuary. 

He crossed the entrance hall and stepped out onto the balcony ringing the wide courtyard that served as the house’s main gathering spot. His people sat on the lawn now, blankets spread like colorful wildflowers over the grass. Mighty shade trees blocked out the harsh sunlight, and the fountain Turgon had been so anxious to see unmarred bubbled at the courtyard’s heart.

Nídon waved him over, and Maeglin crossed to where he sat among a circle of the field workers come down from the mountain. Nídon had a desk lap balanced on his knees, and carefully recorded the reports in Cirth. Many of the Wood-elves had never learned to read or write, but those that could had begun the task of educating. When Maeglin found the time with all the other tasks awaiting his attention, he’d gather all who wished to learn, and given lessons on Tengwar.

Maeglin sat crossed-legged on the grass beside them, keeping quiet and showing the field workers that he could listen to Nídon in respectful silence and not jump in to grasp control. The field workers were still judging whether they could trust him or not. Thinfin and Morfin had caught their master’s scent, and came lopping up to him to butt their noses against him in greeting. They settled down beside him on the grass, and he scratched behind their ears. 

The shadows stretched long fingers, the sun humping low in the sky, when Maeglin’s head snapped up at a cry. Celebeth stood at the courtyard’s threshold leading back into the entrance way. Her dress was torn, split right up the center, her sleeves ripped. There was blood. Blood on her thighs, running down her legs. Her eyes were… There was something in their bones, something empty and awful, as if she looked into the eye of a nightmare. 

Ŷr reached her first, taking her elbow and leading her to sit on one of the wicker chairs. Celebeth followed as through a dream. No one spoke. A terrible silence sliced its way through the backs of their necks. 

Maeglin knelt down in the grass beside her. She trembled like porcelain in an earthquake. She sat at an awkward angle, trying to ease the pain. She squeezed her thighs shut, as if she could block out the flesh that had invaded them. 

Ŷr petted Celebeth’s hair. Celebeth shuddered, but leaned into the touch, so Maeglin picked up her hand, uncurling it to slip between his. In the crease of her palm, stuck there by dried blood, was a scrap of parchment. He pulled it free and turned in over. In Tengwar it read: You were warned.

Maeglin was speared through the chest. This was…they’d done this evil—they’d done this because of _him_. Because he hadn’t shut his mouth and kept his head down. The bones of his heart cracked one by one, splintering into his lungs until he could not _breathe_.

He pressed his lips to Celebeth’s palm, teeth chattering. He was so _sorry_. Her fingers curled around his chin, tilting his face up to hers. Her gaze focused on him, grip pinching in its fierceness, “Don’t you take their evil onto your shoulders.”

Maeglin’s vision blurred with tears. “But I—”

“You _saved_ me. Do you not understand yet? I lived within a foul pit, a lion feasted upon my flesh; I held the body of my devoured daughter in my arms. Do you understand? You carried me out of that pit. You fed me starlight and comforted me in the tomb of my despair.” She squeezed his hand so tight the bones felt like they ground together. “ _They_ did this, not because of you, but because they are animals. Don’t you dare, don’t you _dare_ let them stop you!”

He stood, coiled as a spring, hands fisted behind his back, before Turgon’s desk. Turgon took his time examining the scrap of blood-smeared parchment, as if there was anything more that needed explaining. Then he set it aside and lifted eyes shielded as closed gates, “I see. You may go.”

Just…just go? That was all? “You will do nothing,” Maeglin said like a dead bird.

Turgon’s lips thinned. “I warned you to separate yourself from your father. But every step you have taken has brought you closer to him. You have made sure no one in this city forgets you are Eöl’s son. Do you expect the heritage of a murderer to be accepted?”

“A woman. A human being was raped. She was brutalized and violated, and all you have to say is you warned me? You told me so?”

“I will give you some advice as well, though I do not expect you will follow it, as you did not my last: hire some guards.”

“Some _Noldor_ guards? Since my people are forbidden the carrying of weapons—”

“Your people? That is your problem. As long as name yourself among them, you will continue to face hardships in this city.” He still spoke like they were discussing the fountain in Maeglin’s house. No, not even that. Turgon had shown more passion at the thought of a fountain’s destruction then the rape of a human being.

“She is a person. Her name is Celebeth, and she had a daughter once, and she is someone’s daughter. Are you so lacking in human decency, basic _compassion_? What if it had been Idril who was brutalized and violated—”

“That is _enough_. See yourself out.”

Enough? Yes, he’d had enough. He was heart-sick, choking on anguish and _anger_. He was sick to death of this place, this corpse city crawling with Orcs. And there was no forgiveness in his heart for the king of Orcs. _None_.

He would not infect the sanctuary of the House of the Wolf with this anger tearing its way through his chest. He turned south, taking the Way of Running Waters to the Warrior Fields. They should have named it the Orc Fields. There were no honorable warriors in this city.

He found an empty training field, avoiding the Noldor strutting around showing-off and boasting. He drew Anguirel and began running through his forms. It wasn’t enough to scrape the edge off all this _rage_. He needed to swing at _someone_. He needed to meet blades with Celebeth’s attackers, or Turgon who murderer his father, or the guards who violated Wood-elf bodies, or the vile men ganging at Salgant’s house putting their paws all over dead-eyed women.

“It looks like you could use a sparring partner.”

Maeglin whipped around. Hair that looked as if the sun had been poured onto it, and the sharp angles of a Noldo’s face greeted him. Glorfindel’s gaze met his, and Maeglin was jolted by the sheer blueness of it. Glorfindel’s eyes were blue beyond reason. 

“What?” Maeglin’s couldn’t fit Glorfindel’s offer into the frame of Gondolin and its Noldor. 

What was Glorfindel even doing here? Wasn’t he supposed to be out patrolling the western peaks of the Encircling Mountains, where they dipped to their lowest altitude and were most vulnerable to sulking Orc and spies? Wasn’t that the mark of Glorfindel and his golden House that _they_ were the bravest and noblest of Gondolin’s soldiers? 

“I offered to be your sparring partner,” Glorfindel replied, stepping from the eves of the Warriors’ House. 

Maeglin didn’t answer. The moment Glorfindel stepped into the ring with him, he lifted Anguirel and attacked.

Glorfindel’s sword met the downward slash in a clang of metal. Anguirel hissed with excitement, wanting to taste blood after so long a famine. Maeglin’s rage fed off it, but his mind was like a metal ship’s hull, and would not be pierced and sunk by the hunger of an alien metal.

Glorfindel struck, bringing his sword about in an upward slash from the left, seeking out Maeglin’s weaknesses. Maeglin parried, then let the last reigns of his rage loose and lunged. He fought like his father had taught him. He fought like he could die tomorrow but would live today. It was reckless, but cunning as a serpent’s strike. Pull in close, dart away. Dance with death. 

But there was no alarm in Glorfindel’s eyes. A smile stretched over his lips, exhilaration and excitement. Within him burst a fire that was as unquenchable as the sun. Maeglin was put on the defensive, but there was no holding back such a storm of fire.

Anguirel spiraled out of Maeglin’s hand, skidding over the packed dirt, and cold steel pressed against his throat. “Again?”

Maeglin gave a small jerk of his head, and the sword released him to go pick up his own. Maeglin had not drained himself dry of this rage. He needed more. Glorfindel met his attack.

They sparred three more times, Glorfindel bringing Maeglin to yield every time, possessing a vast deal more skill and experience. Glorfindel stepped back from the last round, sword sliding into his scabbard with the finalistic ring of metal gloving metal, and said, “Might we meet here again on the marrow?”

“Why?” Maeglin’s voice hedged with suspicion. What did Glorfindel want with him? They had never spoken before this day, and only met in a round-about way at that single council meeting.

Glorfindel stepped closer until Maeglin could smell leather, sweat, sunlight, and soft summer rain. Eyes didn’t have a right to be that blue. Glorfindel stared at him another moment, gaze lingering with intensity on Maeglin’s face. “I thought...well, we are cousins, are we not? We could spend time together?” 

Oh yes, they were cousins weren’t they? How nice of Glorfindel to remember it now. But not in all the months before this moment. What about the way Glorfindel’s eyes had looked right through him like all the rest? Where had Glorfindel been all this time that he thought he had the _right_ to claim kinship? He hadn’t been there when Maeglin needed a friend, or when his voice at council would have _done_ something. 

So Glorfindel wanted to be _friends_? Would he invite Maeglin over to his grand house built upon slave labor? Would they eat a meal cooked by human beings all but chained to the stoves? Maybe Glorfindel would pull out one of his favorite wines after, one from his fields that were watered by the sweat of slave brows and the blood of hands worked raw.

Maeglin saw the blood on Celebeth’s thighs, felt her hand trembling in his, saw those beasts in Salgant’s house, the way they panted and pawed and _took_ , that guard who’d put his hands all over a woman who this rotting corpse of a city stole even the right to say no from without earning a beating in an alleyway or blood on thighs for not keeping your Moriquende head _down_ and mouth _shut_.

Maeglin would never be friends with a _Golodh_. “I will never be friends with someone like _you_. How could you even think I would sit down to dinner beside a man who lives on the backs of slaves? I never want anything to do with you.”

Something like an open wound flickered across Glorfindel’s face, but so swiftly it was like nothing more than a muscle spasm. His voice was empty as he said, “Of course.” Then he rounded Maeglin’s shoulders, so close Maeglin could feel the heat of his body, but not quite touching, as if to do so would be something forbidden. 

“I…” The words stuck in the fist of his throat. He hadn’t meant to _hurt_. He hadn’t thought he could. 

Glorfindel did not turn back at the single, impotent word. He strode away, up the shallow steps of the arcade, and into the Warrior’s House.

Maeglin returned to the House of the Wolf with the firm intention of calling upon the House of the Golden Flower tomorrow. He needed to apologize. His words had been ill-done. He wasn’t that person, or he didn’t want to be but maybe he was now, but at least he could apologize.

His people were gathered in the courtyard, minding tasks. Not one had left the house without him accompanying them since Celebeth’s attack yesterday. But they needed a permanent solution, a way to keep them safe when every one of them was banned by law from carrying weapons.

He sat down beside Celebeth and took her hand. He listened in silence as his people discussed the very issue that had been weighing him down. They mentioned Thinfin and Morfin as protection, and the wolves would serve as some, but they needed weapons or armed guards they could trust not turn around and prey upon them.

Celebeth had been sitting in silence, but her eyes present and ears attentive, now she said, “I met a half-Teler in the market the other day. He treated me well, and though he manned a bakery stand and I cannot say whether he has any skill with a weapon or interest in the position, half-bloods with Teleri for the non-Noldo half are allowed weapons.”

“There must be other half-Teleri as well,” Nídon latched onto the idea. And it was a sound one, as long as no prejudice harbored in the half-Teleri’s hearts.

Maeglin said, “I will seek this man out tomorrow, and news of others.” It was the only solution they had, for Maeglin did not trust a Noldo not to abuse power. No Noldor would come into his house and sow fear and powerlessness into its sanctuary.

The next morning he awoke with another full day’s schedule. There never seemed to be enough time. He ached for a forge. Yet though one had been built in back of the house, he had not had the time to set it up properly, much less break in its virginity with a crafting. And he still had not found the time for extensive exploration of the mountain’s mining potential.

He had just sat down to a quick breakfast, when a commotion in the entrance hall drew him out. The doors to the street were open, and a crowd of Wood-elves milled on his doorstep. Nídon spoke to one in the entrance hall. He motioned Maeglin over and thrust a scroll at him. 

“What is going on?” Maeglin asked as he unrolled the scroll. His eyes flew over the Tengwar, widening, even as the unknown Wood-elf answered, “Lord Glorfindel has transferred the working contracts of all the Wood-elves serving in his house in the city to the House of the Wolf.”

Maeglin’s eyes flickered back and forth between the scroll officially declaring the transfer of contracts, and the man’s face. “This…what?” _Why?_

The man gestured to the crowd of Wood-elves behind him. “We are ninety-eight in total, my lord.”

“Well,” said Nídon, eyeing the throng of new Wood-elves, “at least the house is finished. We might have to add a fourth story if this becomes a regular occurrence,” he ended with a teasing smile at Maeglin, eyes shining, high on the thrill of _ninety-eight_ new souls for the House of the Wolf to wrap its arms around and pull into the sanctuary of its courtyard where laughter ran free and voices lifted in song as they worked. And women returned from a trip to the market with blood on their thighs, punishment for having the audacity to hope.

Maeglin called on the House of the Gondolin Flower an hour later. He stood at the gate, waiting to be let in, but no one came to open it for him. He eyed the empty lawn, then unlatched the gate and walked through. As he came up the front steps to the door, a voice floated out from the house, “Where is that confounded Caraspen?”

Another answered, “You sent him to fetch the mop bucket, Lord Steward.”

“ _Yes,_ ,” the voice snapped back, “because he is a clumsy fool and spilled my ink pot all over the floor! Caraspen!” the voice shouted. “Quit your lollygagging and get back here!”

“He probably cannot find the wash closet, Lord Steward. He is a scribe. And not a very good one.”

“We are ruined, _ruined_! Who is to do all this work now? When Lord Glorfindel gets back here I am going to give him such a piece of my mind he will shake in his boots! And if he even _thinks_ of running off to the mountains, I will skin his hide!”

A snort.

Maeglin knocked. The rap of his knuckles against the wood sent the door creaking open. It hadn’t been latched probably, like someone had left in a hurry. 

He splayed his hand over the door and pushed it open wider to reveal an entryway that looked like looters had swept through it. Well, maybe not, but there was a house plant smashed on the tiles, dark soil and earthenware scattered across them. And someone had left a mop and bucket abandoned in the middle. It might be the very mop and bucket the unfortunate Caraspen scrounged for.

Maeglin called out, “I have come to call on Lord Glorfindel.”

Footsteps and then a harried looking man popped into the entrance hall. His face darkened when he saw Maeglin at the door. “ _You_.” Maeglin’s shoulders tensed, prepared for the vitriol that accompanied the word Moriquende. But the man said, jabbing a finger at Maeglin, “This is all your fault! Look at this mess,” his arm flung out, “and not one servant to clean it up for my foolish lord has sent them all to your House!”

“Is he here? Lord Glorfindel? I would speak to him.”

The man threw up his hands, “No! Of course he is not here! He has gone off to inspect his fields. He will not be back for weeks, and has left us all to deal with his mess. Typical!” Then he came at Maeglin, making a shooing gesture, “Now off with you. I do not have time to deal with you!” And slammed the door shut in Maeglin’s face.

When Glorfindel returned to the city, Maeglin called on him, and was turned away at the door, told Glorfindel was out. When he came a second time he was told the same. And the third, and the forth. Maeglin knew Glorfindel was in there. He had lived in this city of corpses long enough to know that in the few months of the year Glorfindel resided in the city, he only left his house when forced to attend council or a King’s Banquet, or escape to the training fields.

After councils Glorfindel unwillingly attended and spoke not one word during, Maeglin would try to flag him down, but Glorfindel disappeared. It was almost as if Glorfindel was ephemeral. He ensnared the eye like a pillar of gold and acquired adoration wherever he went, but it was as if he were not really there. Maeglin would stare at Glorfindel seated across the council table from him, and feel like Glorfindel kept slipping away under his eyes. 

And then Glorfindel was gone again, into the mountains, and when he returned, Maeglin stopped trying to find him. His vision had eroded, fenced in by the violence and hate hammering at the back of his neck, bruising his shoulders as he tried to wrap his people up in his arms. But he only had two arms, two hands, was but one man facing into a gale of hatred.

Celebeth had conceived with her rapist’s child. She kept it a secret until her body no longer could. He watched her swing between horror and love. Her hands avoided her swelling stomach some days, caressing it others as she whispered the child’s mother-name: Legolas.

Maeglin had found two half-Teleri willing to take employment as guards in his House. Two seemed so thin a shield, and his people’s mobility crimped, but at least there were no more attacks, though they were followed wherever they went. Maeglin never left the house without his sword and Thinfin and Morfin loping at his side. The walls closed in around them, oozing the reek of decaying corpses.

The animals hunting them couldn’t get a good mouthful, so they found another target. Maeglin looked into the face of one of his people living on the mountain as words of the attack dropped like stones from a mouth still carrying dried blood in its creases. His people, terrorized, beaten, raped, and two murdered. Even in Gondolin, outright killing of a Wood-elf was a crime rarely committed, and would earn the Kinslayer the life of an Outcast.

Maeglin threw the crimes done against his people down on Turgon’s desk. Turgon might have done nothing but for those two deaths. Did that mean they did not die in vain? Their murder bought his people on the mountain the unprecedented right to carry weapons. Not swords or even bows and knives that were the Wood-elves’ traditional weapons of choice, but axes. They could carry a woodman’s axe to meet the steel swords seeking to slice their necks. 

Maeglin took Turgon’s ruling and stretched it like the skin of a balloon until his people could slip inside and find shelter within. They could have axes? Well Maeglin would forge them axes, axes the like of which had never been seen! And they would train and train and train until the Golodhrim preying upon them became the prey.

By the time the mountain’s mining operations launched in earnest, there were no more attacks on the House of the Wolf. Orcs, after all, were a cowardly race.

*

Maeglin loathed King’s Banquets, but attendance was mandatory. When the dancing began, he slipped away into the King’s Gardens. Others preferred strolling through the gardens as well, but he had no desire to stop and chat with Golodhrim on marble benches under canopies of roses.

He heard some of them coming now, and skipped the stepping stones of the garden’s defining feature: a large pond. Silver and gold-finned fish darted away as his shadow flashed over them. Turtles as colorful as flowers blinked lazy eyes from velvet-green lily pads, the lilies’ yellow throats turned to the starlit sky. 

Across the flat stones he slipped around a yew bush pruned into the shape of a proud peacock, and another of a stag crowned in a mighty rack of antlers. The King’s Gardens were known for not only the serene beauty of its water-lilies, but the preternaturalness of its golden roses. Arches, lattices, and pavilions had been crafted from the roses’ vines, and beneath one such latticework he now slipped.

He held his fortress of roses as a pair of bejeweled ladies ambled by, hands tucked into each other’s elbow crooks. He folded his arms over his chest, and craned his head back to stare up at the stars. 

He would be trapped in the palace for a few more hours until the festivities began to unwind. What was the point of dragging him to these things? To make sure he never forgot for one moment what they thought of him?

His eyes traced the consolations. He could feel his father’s hand curled warm around his as his father guided his finger to trace the star patterns as he named them in the Star Tongue. He had been fifteen and his eyes full of wonder as he looked upon the night sky in its unveiled beauty for the first time as they traveled to the Khazâd halls.

His bones still ached to wrap themselves around his father and mother’s bodies, curled like a child in their laps just one last time. No, no last time. Why couldn’t they have stayed like that forever? Why couldn’t they still be home right now, cocooned in soft twilight and love? He ached with homesickness.

A flash of gold drew his eye. He watched as Glorfindel traversed the same path he had and chose a hedge to slip behind on the path’s other side. Maeglin’s jaw set, and he swept around his awning of gold roses to stride towards Glorfindel’s hiding place. It was high time Glorfindel stopped sitting like a lump on a log during the councils while Maeglin fought and fought and accomplished nothing, like he waged war with the tides of the ocean, the turn of the Earth.

As he rounded the hedge, Glorfindel’s eyes widened and he made to turn and disappear around its other side. Maeglin shot forward and pinned the breadth of Glorfindel’s shoulders between caging hands, palms pressed into the sturdiness of the fence the hedge had grown up around for support. “I want to talk to you.”

Their faces hovered close. It was the closest he’d come to touching a Golodh since that day they sparred over a year ago. Glorfindel’s lips parted, and he stared back at Maeglin with those impossibly blue eyes, the color pure as the jewel-bright blue of a mineral spring.

Maeglin remembered that day Glorfindel had stood up at the council table and _done_ something, and he saw the faces of the Wood-elves Glorfindel had freed from service to his House. “Why did you do it? Why did you send me the Wood-elves? Why did you speak out in the council that day? Why do you keep silent now? Why are you never at council when I need you—” 

Glorfindel wrapped his arm around the slender narrow of Maeglin’s waist and kissed him. Shock crystallized Maeglin. Glorfindel’s arms wound around Maeglin’s neck to flush them, and his mouth grew embolden when Maeglin did not reject him. His tongue licked against Maeglin’s bottom lip. It was enough to shatter the shock and send a spike of _fury_ erupting through Maeglin from his soles to the crown of his head. 

He shoved Glorfindel off him. “Get your _filthy_ hands off me!”

What _right_ —but Golodhrim had never needed right. They were the most aggressive of predators, _taking_ whatever caught their eye, and _crushing_ the vertebra of any prey that dared to fight back. Blood on thighs. Hands roaming breasts. Dead-eyed women caged in laps while lions pawed and ate their fill. Two bodies the life had been slashed out of by Orc claws. Blood crusting lips, bruised, battered faces, houses torched, a community that already had _nothing_ terrorized, and more bodies savaged by lions because they never had their fill and always had to keep taking and taking and taking.

“Did you ask me if I wanted your hands on me? Did you ask before you took what you wanted? No, because animals like you never ask. You only know how to _take_. Well I _never_ want someone like _you_ putting your hands on me.”

Blood on thighs. Brutalized faces, eyes bruised with years and years of heels crushing their necks. Maeglin couldn’t bear another moment in this corpse palace with its corpse king and its Orc guards. He fled to the sanctuary of the House of the Wolf, though its walls closed tight around them. Lying under the canopy of its tree shade with Nídon and Celebeth’s voices lifted in soft star-song was the closest he had to escape, to a bridge back home out of this nightmare.

*

Forty years later

Whatever Golodh had sired Legolas had been born in Aman and his body changed in the Light of the Trees. Legolas was like Maeglin, growing rock-slow compared to the sapling sprouts of children born of parents whose bodies had never soaked in the Light of those Trees.

Legolas lay now on his belly beside Maeglin on the bed, reading one of the Tengwar books Maeglin had borrowed for him from the palace library. He’d wandered from his mother’s side while she conducted the business of running the house, unofficially of course. By law, a Wood-elf could not rise to the place of Head of Household, but they could perform the tasks of an assistant, which was Celebeth’s official title.

Legolas was growing up and would soon no longer be satisfied with the world between the sheltering walls of the House of the Wolf. But for now his ears were bare of the iron hoops piercing Wood-elf ears, branding them for the Golodhrim’s _comfort_.

The iron hoops were given as a child, and sealed up with Golodhrim craftsmanship so that the earrings could not be removed without smithery. Legolas, whose birth had been hidden here within these walls, had never been pierced, but if he crossed the threshold of the house and ventured into the hostile city, he must be. 

Maeglin turned his eyes back to the schedule he drew up of the rotations of the guards on Turgon’s Tower. For days he’d done reconnaissance, crossing the King’s Square at different hours of the day, always cutting close enough to the Towers’ base and the two guards at its doors to catch the edges of their minds, probing them like the brush of a moth’s wing. He put together the puzzle of what he’d learned, seeking a pocket of time when two guards with weak minds intercrossed.

He could hardly _ask_ Turgon for access to the Tower. It was Turgon’s holy sanctuary where he spent most of his evenings and many nights. If the nights Turgon slept in the Tower were not erratic and unplottable, Maeglin would have tried sneaking in during the cover of darkness. But during the daylight hours, the business of rule drew Turgon from the Tower. 

Inside that Tower was the sole eye that could pierce the imprisoning mountains and gaze into the free lands beyond: a Palantír. Maeglin risked Turgon’s wrath falling in a hammer-blow upon his back if he was caught, but he _needed_ to know. He needed to know if what he’d dreamed was a nightmare of his own making or one of reality. He needed to know if Nan Elmoth burned.

Legolas bounced up from his lazy spread onto his knees. “Can I take Thinfin and Morfin with me to the courtyard?” The lounging wolves' ears swiveled at their names, snouts lifting from the perch of their crossed front paws. 

Climbing the courtyards’ trees and catching a glimpse of the streets beyond the walls of the house was one of the greatest adventures in Legolas’ sheltered life. But as restricted as his life was by space, he was freer within these walls than any child born of a Wood-elf’s body since the city’s founding.

“Go ahead,” Maeglin waved him off, “but no climbing on the roof this time!”

"I promise!" Legolas jumped on Maeglin’s back like an exuberant puppy. 

“Oof! You are getting too heavy for that. Now off with you.” He whistled the wolves over. Legolas buried his fingers in the thick fir on both their heads, and headed for the bedroom door. Walking between the wolves, he looked like a Wolf Prince.

*

The Alley of Roses spilled Maeglin into the King’s Square where the crowds gathered affluence. At the center of the square rose Turgon’s White Tower with a meticulously tended garden at its gleaming feet. The garden exemplified everything Gondolin was with her love of flashing the diamonds in her ears and gold coiled about her neck, only roses and orchids could do for such a one as the Tower’s Garden. The air hung thick with their fragrance and the stifling humidity of the valley. 

Across from the Tower’s doors, and the guards stationed at them, rose a pavilion dedicated to Ulmo, the city’s patron god. Maeglin strolled up the marble walkway bridging over the bubbling pool of water ringing the pavilion. The pavilion doubled as a shrine to the Sea-god, and devotees to his worship had left offerings inside. Lit incense wafted out. Maeglin leaned his shoulder against a marble column, and settled a haughty, unapproachable look on his face as he cast his gaze out over the square in apparent disinterest. 

His eyes wandered until they strayed to the base of the Tower. The distance was further than he’d ever attempted to penetrate with his mind, but he would succeed. He had to.

He caught the first guard in the net of his eyes, hooking him in like a fish, and pressed his will into him. He set the guard free when he was satisfied with his work, and moved on to the next. Then he straightened from his slouch and meandered his way to the Tower’s doors. When he drew close, he quickened his pace, but not enough to draw attention to himself. He slipped passed the guards who did not raise a word of protest, and into the Tower.

The Palantír was kept in the Tower’s uppermost chamber. Maeglin did not doddle on the staircase snaking its way up the Tower’s inner walls. 

Beige, was his first impression of the domed chamber as he walked in, boot falls echoing back at him. In a city of white, the Tower’s floor was set with earthy agate stones, and the high walls that faced the city in proud marble were inlaid with fawn-colored sandstone. The only light slipped in from high windows and trailed in soft beams dancing with dust motes. It was peaceful, and nothing like he would have expected of Turgon's sanctuary.

The Palantíri was tucked in a recess on a low pillar of sandstone, not planted with arrogant power in the room's center. Maeglin walked slowly towards the lone sphere. 

A rustling noise drew his attention to other occupants of the alcove. His fingers tailed over the cloth covered lumps stacked against the wall. With a flip of his hand, the cloth slid off the lump to reveal a bird cage. 

A bird so green it rivaled an emerald squawked at him, rubbing its wings against its body in irritation at the introduction of light. He could not name the bird; it was an exotic breed. From the brilliance of its plumage he guessed it favored a tropical region.

His gaze darted to the dozens of others cages, all covered. He let the cloth fall over the cage again. Strange as it was, he had no intention of being caught because he’d squandered time snooping through Turgon’s possessions.

He turned back to the Palantíri. Clouds of black and darkest blue swirled under the glassiness of its surface. It was a masterpiece, the evidence of a great craftsman's skill, even without taking into account the magic he could feel throbbing from the stone in heady waves. His hands rested on either side of the stone, staring down at it, transfixed. 

He smelt Power.

With just the tips of his fingers he initiated the calling, and even that felt too much as a world of violet light and a Power so strong it threatened to buckle his knees sucked him inside. Lands flew by, oceans of grass and the craggy teeth of mountains and a sea so immense he fell into obscurity. He was dizzy and drunk as the Power sung like rough salt grass and a sky so blue it hurt. 

The magic in the stone reacted to his vast magical potential. Everything went too fast, directionless. Then the understanding that he had yet to give the Power purpose sliced through the swinging of his mind like a pendulum.

“Show me Maedhros Fëanorion.” The magic shivered under the Power of his voice, the strength of his will, and _bent_ to him with the single-mindedness that only focused magic could achieve, the kind of focus that could rip the bones from a mountain and scream back at a raging typhoon for dominance.

He saw a room, and homesickness pinch his belly. There were no too-bright lights or white white white painted into the back of his eyelids with the colorlessness following him even into dreams. There was dark woods that he wanted to press his ear against and ask where it came from and hear what stories it creaked. There was a hearth that ruled a wall, casting the warm light of home about the room. And there was a man. 

Maeglin saw endless legs and knew this man would eclipse his own height. He saw hair red as a hawk's wing, and just as sleek. The slender hand of a born scholar, but carrying the calluses of a soldier, flipped the curtain of hair out of the man’s face, and eyes a luminous grey that _demand_ attention seemed to look right into him. 

Maeglin did not need the man to speak to know he looked upon Fëanor's firstborn son, an eagle among men.

"Turgon?" Maedhros rose and walked towards Maeglin, or rather, the Palantíri that allowed Maeglin this vision. Maedhros' voice carried surprise, as if it had been a very long time since he heard a call from this Palantír, which was probably true.

Maedhros reached his Palantír, and Maeglin watched as he placed a hand upon it with the easy confidence of ownership. These were Fëanor's workmanship and now belonged to Maedhros with his father's death.

Maeglin could feel Maedhros’ _fëa_ even through the distance of the stone, and tasted the pungent power of his magic. It was spicy and carried the alluring musk of a predator. Maedhros’ voice wasn’t surprised now, but sharp when he demanded: /Who is this?/

Maeglin considered how to word his request without getting on his knees (he would never beg a Golodh for anything again), but still receive the answers he _needed_ to have. But the indecisiveness of his mind thinned the thread of his control, and he lost his tenuous hold upon the magic. It was not like the magick of the Land. It was more controlled, but also more dangerous to Maeglin because it was the magic of the mind, its creator's mind. The stone's magic both enhanced his own and fed upon it, until it flung in all directions and Maeglin was falling falling falling, sliding into a place he hadn’t meant to invade: Maedhros' mind.

They lay side-by-side on the bed. His back pressed into the cotton shirt that did nothing to bank the heat of the skin behind him. An arm draped over his hip and propped the heavy book up so that his eyes could follow along. He loved hearing Father read. There was nothing as melodious as his voice, and no comfort better than the gentle rumbling of Father's chest at his back.

The door opened and the firelight beyond cupped Mother's hair, setting it ablaze. His little brother trailed at Mother's side, lips sulking because the brother in Mother's tummy took up all the room on Mother's hips, leaving none for him.

"Fëanor," Mother said, voice weary, hands pressing into her lower back as they often did these days, making her belly stick out like a giant melon. "Watch Maglor for a bit, will you? I need to lie down."

Father shifted behind him and gestured to the open side of the bed, "Come lie here, and Maglor too." Father scooted Maedhros closer to his chest, making room for the rest of their family.

"That sounds lovely. You know how I love hearing you read." Mother smiled tiredly.

Maglor skipped over to the bed, little hands grabbing hold of the spread as he tried to swing one of his short legs over. He struggled with the height.

Maedhros made a move to help his little brother, but Father put a hand against his chest, keeping him still. "No, let Maglor do it."

"But he will take forever, and I want to hear what happens next in the story!"

"Yes, it will take him longer," Father agreed, "but if you do not let him succeed on his own, then he will never know he can, and when he is older you will have to do everything for him because he will believe he will always fail. That would take up much more of your time, wouldn't it, little fox?" 

He craned his neck up, looking for Father's smile like diamonds, and found it.

Maglor had to use all his cleverness to defeat the mountain bed, but eventually he crawled across the covers to Maedhros' side. Mother lay down with a sigh, big belly pointed at the ceiling. Maglor pressed his ear against the mound, listening as he often did for signs of their brother and proof that he really was growing in there like a sweet-pea in a pod. Mother threaded her fingers through Maglor's short curls and Father's chest started rumbling against his back.

The memory slipped away like smoke as another came rushing in. This one hit him with a fist.

They had laid him out like an offering to their god. He was spread eagle, hands and feet bound, even his neck clamped in a cruel band of iron. He was naked, but he was always naked here. Hands touched him, clawing at him, violating him _everywhere_. 

"Say it!" A pair of eyes like lamps bent over him. The black skin stretched gaunt over wide cheekbones, a fall of hair coarse as a horse's tail brushed against his chest and belly. "It can all be over, all you need do is say it. Admit Melkor is Lord of Arda. Get on your knees before God. I promise you, the sweetness found in his service is an ecstasy unlike any you will ever know,” the voice turned cajoling, the clawed hands cupping his jaw in the mockery of tenderness.

Their promises, Morgoth’s promises, whispered to him from all the dark corners of his cell. They told him he need but open his mind to find true understanding. They told him he lived in a confined world or webs and boxes and if he only reached out his hand and took what they offered he would find true freedom. 

What need was there for laws here in darkness? Who could tell him he could not do that or must be this? He had been stripped to the bones and offered what they thought would tempt him most. 

How their words seemed like wisdom in this place of torment where his mind twisted itself into knots of pain and despair. Were the stars the beauty in the night sky or was it the darkness between them? Was not the darkness the vaster creation? An unending wonder, a void waiting to be filled. The darkness had been there before the light, and would be there after the light had gone. It was inexhaustible, birthing and generating itself as light never could. Darkness would outlast the light. It was only sensible that he surrender to its superiority.

In those thoughts lay the false relief of escape to be found inside submission. They were honeyed-lies, and he would rather scream for eternity than surrender to Morgoth’s deceit.

"Never." It didn't matter that the word bled, raw and brutalized like his throat from the screams. It was as eternal as the stars.

The Orc screamed, the mocking hand slicing down his skin, drawing lines of blood. Maedhros smiled through the pain. This was how it was supposed to be. He hated the mind-games the worst because these creatures with the eyes of maddened zealots had the bones of Elves crawling beneath their skin. They still had too much of the Quendi in them to be anything but monsters. 

There was a terror eating at the back of his mind. These creatures, the servants of the Enemy who spun lies from their too-Elven lips, were unknown to him. He didn’t know what they were or how the Black One formed them, and what if they were his destiny? What if he never got out and the defiance he clung to like breath was shattered by the stretch of years uncounted, and the lines between Quendi and Orc bled together until all that was left of him was a monster creeping into children’s nightmares?

The memory flew away like a carrion bird a dying man was relieved to see go. But there were more, so many, a lifetime's worth. They swirled past like quick-silver.

An arm draped over his shoulders. They were both bare from the waist-up for it was a scorching summer day. "Hells, but it's hot!" Maeglin couldn’t place the emotion saturating the memory at the sound of the other male's voice. It was too complicated, too all encompassing…

Blue eyes like oceans, for Fingon was just as restless as one, always overflowing with energy and movement. Fingon's temple fell against his softly with a sigh. Fingon smelt of sweat and the bier of the ocean spread out below their dangling legs. "I am thinking about moving North, what do you say, Maedhros? Leave Tirion behind and all those Noldor too stuck on themselves to pull on some linen, even after they have sweated right through their layers of silks. We could build one of those tree houses the Elves used to live in, way up on some mountain side. Just you and me," Fingon grinned, releasing his cousin to flop back on the tinny hills of white sand, hand coming up to shade his eyes from the snarling sun.

It was such a mundane, lazy conversation, but that feeling exploded in his chest as he stared down at Fingon's face peering back at him through the shade of his fingers with the mischievous smile of a possum. The feeling was warm and sweet like baked bread, unbreakable as infinity, and hurt like misery. Maeglin couldn't name the emotion, it was so powerful. He felt like he should know it. It was…it was…

Maedhros’ magic rose like a firestorm about him, hot and wrathful, and _threw_ Maeglin out. A voice as dangerous and implacable as the deeps of space: /Reveal yourself!/

Maeglin hadn't meant to, but it was done. He'd looked into something he'd had no right to see. This time wasn’t anything like the other times he’d dipped without cringe of conscience into the minds around him, even though he’d written over other’s freewill with his own. This time felt like violation. 

He tore his mind from the stone as easily as snapping a thread, though he thought, as he headed for the door, that Maedhros might have been trying to hold him there. But his mind had always been exceptionally potent. The acknowledgment came with no pride this time.

He was almost at the door before he realized Maedhros would call Turgon in the Palantír, tell him what happened, and demand Maeglin’s identity. Maeglin didn’t know if Turgon would be able to detect his tempering with the guards’ minds. But if Maeglin was discovered, his punishment would be without mercy, and gleefully egged on by the enemies ringing him and his House. 

He forced himself to go back to the stone. He had to barter for Maedhros' silence, but also for the knowledge of Nan Elmoth’s fate. But what did he have to give the Fëanorion in exchange? 

His thumbs brushed the smooth stone, his whole body leaning away from it, not wanted to get tangled in its magic. He called Maedhros again. There was a long moment dropping into coiled anxiety before Maedhros answered, voice clipped and cold as he demanded, /Who are you?/

/I will tell you, but in a trade. Information for information./

Maedhros answered, sharp as a knife cutting to the bone, /I make no bargains with the Enemy./

/I am no servant of Morgoth./

/What evidence is there that you are not? You call me from Turgon's stone, but that accounts for little./

/I am no servant of Morgoth./ Maeglin repeated.

/Are you not?/ Maedhros’ face was as apathetic as the rocks that had broken Eöl’s body. /What gave you the Power to pull away when I held you here? What Black Magic let you slip like a snake into my mind?/

/I…apologize./ He had not asked for forgiveness from a Golodh in so long he’d forgotten the taste of the words in his mouth. But he had done wrong, so he let loose a single thread of knowledge, /I have always been able to look behind eyes, ever since I was a child. But it was not my intention to invade your mind in such a way./

Maedhros' face was unmoved. /Some Elves can look into another’s memories, but no Elf should be able to break into the mind of one as highly trained in the art of Ósanwe as I am. It is not a power given to the Elves. It is of the Ainur./ 

Maeglin answered firmly, because he would not shrink like some spineless toady to the knees of a Golodh, /If I were of the Ainur, then how could you have pushed me from your mind? Why would I be attempting to convince you I was a Quendë when I could rip whatever information I wished from your mind and not bother with deceit?/

/It has never been said that Morgoth was feeble of mind; no doubt he has some trickery planned./

/Well, I am a Quendë. And I can look into any mind, and have done so since I was a child even if no other Quendi can. You can either believe me or not. But the information I ask is a small thing that has nothing to do with your lands or armies or the war. I want only for you to tell me if the forest of Nan Elmoth still stands, as if ever has, unchanged as far as your knowledge reaches./

Maedhros paused before answering. /Your name I demand. After you give it, we will discuss payment for this knowledge./

/No./ Maeglin snapped back. /I give you nothing until you give me something first./

/Then we have no deal./

/Then we have no deal./ Maeglin’s cut back just as haughtily.

But neither of them broke the connection, both waiting for the other to bend first. Moments ticked passed in stalemate. Then Maedhros circled in from another angle, /If you are indeed not in service to Morgoth, then you would have felt honor-bound or guilt-bound to repay me for the violation of my mind./

A laugh ripped out of Maeglin’s throat, stabbed up from his heart that had blackened around the dagger plunged in long ago and all the weeds choking it to death. The laughter tasted like rust. / _Honor-bound_? You speak to me of honor, Golodh? Your people do not know the _meaning_ of the word. You honorless _animals_./

Silence greeted his outburst. He had lost control of himself and revealed too much. But then Maedhros said, soft, all the bite chased out of the words, /Nan Elmoth grows as thick and shadowed as it ever has. No Darkness has fallen over that forest to my knowledge, and unless something befell it in the last few days, I would know. What made you fear for it?/

Maeglin did not answer that, but he said, because he still had his honor and would keep his word, /I am Maeglin Starchild./ As if his name were the key for a lock, the door swung open and he knew Maedhros could see him as clearly as he could see the other's face with its cheekbones like the sweeping points of falcon wings.

Maedhros’ gaze roved over his face for a long moment, his thoughts kept tightly locked behind sculpted bones. /Your father was Eöl of Nan Elmoth. He murdered your mother, is that not so?/ Maedhros asked, not contemptuous but not compassionate either.

/That is a _lie_. But no doubt you drank it from Turgon’s lips. Probably went down without a hiccup. After all, is murder not all a Golodh expects of a _Moriquende_?/

/I wonder what has filled your heart with such hatred./ 

/I licked it up off the streets of hell./ Maeglin looked away, jaw clenching. He was losing control again, and spilling himself all over the place. 

/Tell me what happened, then. Tell me the truth of how Aredhel died./ Maedhros asked, too softly. Why was he speaking to Maeglin like this? Golodhrim weren’t supposed to be…

/It was an accident./ But he said no more than that. The grief had not soothed with time. He could not speak of it even to his people, and not to this Golodh who wasn’t like the Golodhrim of Gondolin, but wasn’t his friend either. 

Maedhros said nothing for another stretch of time, before he asked, /What brought you from Nan Elmoth?/ 

/An accident./ He said like the dull edge of a knife.

A pause. Then, /And what would you have of me, Maeglin son of Aredhel, now that you have pursued my mind at your leisure and rooted though things that did not concern you?/ The words were bleached as bones, all the softness stripped from their flesh.

/It was not my intent—/

Maedhros cut the words off before they gained wings. /Your intention or not, you assaulted my mind./ 

Maeglin’s mouth worked. He’d apologized. Was Maedhros demanding he own him a favor, a debt to assuage the violation? It felt like Maedhros was trying to slip a collar around his neck. Did Maeglin not already have enough bonds shackling him? /If you are waiting for me to acknowledge a debt, then you will continue to wait. I apologized. It was an accident. But I own you nothing./

/I asked for nothing./

Maeglin’s lip curled, bitterness strangling his heart. /Do not pretend you were not angling to./ He was done with this conversation. If he lingered in the Tower much longer he risked being caught. /I have duties to attend to./

Before Maeglin cut the connection, Maedhros said, /You may contact me again, Maeglin, but not my brothers./

/Who are you to command me? I am not your _dog_!/

/Peace. I do not ask this from a throne looking down, or out of the eyes of one who would ever have you call him master. You admitted you had no control over entering my mind. I would not have you lose yourself in the Palantír’s pull while speaking to one of my brothers. They have not the experience with Mind-arts as I, and perhaps could not throw you from their minds./ Maedhros did not need to name the one who had given him this over-priced experience. 

Maeglin acknowledged the truth in Maedhros’ words, and his temper cooled. /Very well. I shall not contact them./

/Until we speak again then. Cousin./ The vision cut off, and Maeglin was left holding a sphere of swirling clouds, that last word echoing around his mind.


	45. Chapter 40

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 40

Year 443 of the First Age, the Pass of Aglon, Curufin and Celegorm’s stronghold 

It was a miserable day, especially for traveling. The fog that had clung thick and chill to the proud, bald head of Himring when Celebrimbor rode out with the dawn had turned into cold rain. He wore mud like a second skin, and even the seal-skin of his cloak couldn’t keep the icy droplets from slithering down his neck and steadily soaking his tunic. 

The twin towers of the Great Wall rose like two thorns, pikes of black granite built into the hips of the cliffs. His father and Celegorm had built their stronghold where the arm of the Pass of Aglon was narrowest. They’d raised a Great Wall of stone running perpendicular to the cliff faces, bisecting them, and challenging the cliffs at a height of fifty meters, daring Morgoth to throw them his worst.

Celebrimbor bit down on irritation when he saw a herd of goats blocking the road. The gorge was less than a mile in diameter here, and every inch of it but the road was valuable vegetable and fruit gardens. The goats clogged the road, hemmed in by the fences lining the road and keeping them out of the fields. He wanted a hot bath, a full stomach, and his bed, not necessarily in that order.

He slowed his horse to a walk as he came up on the herd’s heels, forcing himself not to hover at their backs and reveal his impatience. “Slick on the slopes today?” he called out to the bundled shepherdesses.

One of the women cast a glance back through soaking black curls, hands twirling the staff in her hands as deftly as a soldier his sword as she prodded the reluctant goats on. Her steps were strong and certain as a man’s without the dresses of noble women confining her body’s natural movements. She wore dark breeches under an ankle-length tunic slit to the hip to both conserve her modesty and unleash her stride, granting her the freedom of movement she needed on the steep slopes. 

She made a clicking noise with her tongue, a sign of displeasure adopted from the language of shepherds. “Aye, my lord. One of the goats took a tumble, and ye know if the goats can’t keep their feet, that’s the sign to find low pastures.”

“This rain should blow over in a few days time,” Celebrimbor replied, having nothing better to do than chat with the woman as her herd clogged the road. 

“I hope.” She nudged a lagging goat with the end of her staff, smacking it back with its brothers. The goats kept trying to huddle in packs and present their rears to the icy rain. 

As the gate neared, Celebrimbor kicked his horse into a trot, ready to clear the distance between him and a roof as quickly as possible, though he was not looking forward to the conversation awaiting him when he was once more at his father’s side.

Celebrimbor was a Fëanorion, and a Fëanorion was never spineless, but his father would be furious, and if there was one thing Celebrimbor found his blood thinning and shoulders hunching against, it was his father’s temper. It was not often Celebrimbor defied his father outside of his own head, but he had reached the end of his endurance and would do what he had to to wrestle control of his life out from under his father’s heavy boot. 

He doubted much had changed with his father since he’d left to visit his uncles five years ago. But _he_ had changed. He wasn’t content to sit on his hands and hope things would get better if he only persevered. Things weren’t getting better; they were getting worse.

The Oath consumed Curufin. It was his driving purpose, the reason behind his every decision. There was a time when other things, like family or the forge his father had not entered in years, had occupied his father’s heart and mind. But there were times now Curufin would look at him, eyes cold, judging, measuring Celebrimbor and finding him lacking, and Celebrimbor wondered if his father loved anything anymore. Love anything but the memory of Fëanor. 

Celebrimbor had yanked himself out of the sphere of his father’s influence five years ago, thinking if he could just get some distance from Curufin, some _rest_ from that obsessiveness his father served the Oath with, then he could find equilibrium before returning to his father’s side. But distance had only made the fanatical fervor and that absolute hand of control on his neck the harder to bear. 

He loved Curufin, but he didn’t think he could live under his roof any longer:

His father had given him lessons when he was a child in what it meant to be a Fëanorion. He’d actually seated Celebrimbor down and laid out the rules he had to live by. Celebrimbor had soaked it all up, memorized all the things he couldn’t do and had to be, so that when the time came and he was tested, he would not fail. He’d show his father how well he’d learned, and his father’s eyes would fill with pride and love as they looked on him.

His father’s eyes weren’t filling with anything now. They were fixed on Celebrimbor’s tired face critically. They picked apart all the flaws in Celebrimbor’s stance and grip –every just-slightly-too-slow step and block— in the same way Celebrimbor held up a finished jewel to the light and noted every little flaw in his creation. He could have done better. He should have spent a little more time on the sanding, polished that curve a bit shaper. He needed to be better; he _was_ better.

His father looked at him as if seeing all the flaws. He found Celebrimbor wanting, and Celebrimbor had to bridle his tongue to keep from lashing out.

“You are not _trying_.”

“I _am_ ” Celebrimbor ground back, hefting the sword in his hands though they’d been going at this for hours and his arms burned and his tailbone was killing him from where he’d landed on it badly.

“Then get up and fight me,” Curufin threw back, words an attack, but his face untouchable. 

His father was terrifying in battle. Celebrimbor feared that cold focus more than the feral fire of Maedhros’ eyes when Orc-blood stained his sword. His father killed like he was bored. He cut through enemy ranks with dispassionate deliberation and the grace of a dancer. There was a sick sort of elegance about the way he killed, as if he’d been born for it.

Celebrimbor forced himself to his feet to meet the opponent he could never hope to defeat. He was not a poor fighter; he’d killed his share of Orcs and lead men into battle, but he was no Maedhros, no Curufin. He was not good enough for his father. He used to be. 

His father sprang, sword arcing down and Celebrimbor barely fumbled a block, caught off-guard. He was getting sloppy, and the curl of his father’s lip told him Curufin thought so too. The force of his father’s blows shook the bones in his arms. 

“You think Morgoth is resting?” Curufin hissed between blows, the words slithering cold as snake language down Celebrimbor’s spine. “He is not sitting about making pretty gems. You have let your skills rust! What will you do if he breaks the siege tomorrow and a host of Orcs come swarming over our lands?” Curufin’s face was inches from his own, pushing their locked swords against Celebrimbor’s chest. 

It took everything Celebrimbor had, but he threw his father off. Curufin did not stumble. He ran narrowed eyes down Celebrimbor’s panting body, his own pristine, and twirled his sword in mocking semicircles in the air. 

“I am not _weak_ ,” Celebrimbor snapped. His anger opened like blazing hawk’s wings in his chest. A Fëanorion was never weak.

“Then prove it to me. Show me that when Morgoth strikes, you will still be standing after.”

Of course Celebrimbor had not been able to. Not with swords, not against his father.

He hadn’t been able to endure cold knives of his father’s eyes in shoulder blades another week, and ridden for the refuge of Himring the next day.

There had been a time when he had not doubted his father’s love, but that was before he doubted his father’s sanity. It was the Oath of course; it was always the Oath with Curufin. Everything he did, ever step he took, every game he played to consolidate more power, was in the Oath’s name. Every person he used or loved or mourned was looked at though that twisted lens. 

The Oath preyed upon his mind, eating at him. Not one of Fëanor’s sons did not know Curufin thought he had loved their father best. He did not conceal the belief, or the conviction that he’d known Fëanor’s heart deeper than any other. He clung to the Oath as if its achievement would bring Fëanor back.

No one in their right mind would ever make Curufin High King. He would have taken Morgoth head-on the moment Fëanor’s body burnt in his arms, or else he would have sacrificed whoever he’d had to to implant his own spies in Morgoth’s ranks and procured the Silmarils by stealth and daggers in the dark. He would have gotten them all killed and snarled in Morgoth’s face while he did it, throwing his arms wide and embracing death when it came with its promise of reunion with Fëanor.

The Oath Madness, as Celebrimbor named it, had not always been so apparent. But the devastating fire of fanaticism grew in Curufin over the years of the Oath’s unfulfillment. It wasn’t just the hot flashes of his temper that had become perilous, but the coldness, the hardening of his heart until he was transformed into this creature demanding perfection and obedience from Celebrimbor.

The gates of the Great Wall were opened jaws he rode though, their battlements spiked like black teeth. The Fëanorion city was pressed up against the southern side of the Great Wall, protected from the Enemy in the north by its teeth. 

His father and uncle’s stronghold rose like a grim, proud face on the cliffs’ apex, looming black and daunting against the grey sky. It was inaccessible to a ground invasion. Once they would have believed (hoped) Morgoth could never take the Pass of Aglon from Fëanor’s sons, but that was before they learned what a Dragon was. 

Celebrimbor took his horse up the zigzag path scored into the precipitous cliffs’ side. In winter, the path was treacherous and often snowed in. Only lightly loaded Elves could carry supplies up the trail lest the burden become too great and sink their light feet under the snow.

It was a strange thing to think he might not scale these cliffs again for many seasons. He did not waver in his course though. Let it never be said a Fëanorion was fainthearted. Once they decided upon a path, nothing, not the will of the Valar nor the power of nature itself could turn them aside.

The idea had fallen upon him in intervals, stray thoughts that compounded into a needlepoint of determination. When he set his mind to a task, he was as single-minded as his grandfather had ever been. Celebrimbor had decided he would go to Gondolin, so he was going to Gondolin.

It was not solely to escape his father’s influence. He could shrug free from his father’s boot easily enough with any of his uncles and had often stayed with Maedhros when his father had become too overbearing. But curiosity had lit up his heart like a match struck in the dark when he’d learned from Maedhros of the cousin who loved forge fires and breathed the smoke and hiss of creation. 

Gondolin was where he dwelt: Maeglin, the son of Aredhel, a cousin after his own heart. A creator’s interest had started like an itch between Celebrimbor’s shoulder blades when Maedhros first told him of Maeglin. He wanted to pick Maeglin’s brain and sink into the world of inspiration like sparks until they breathed the same air and dreamt two twinning dreams of creation. He wanted what he’d once shared with his grandfather and father. He wanted the romance of an intellectual bonding, sweeter and more fulfilling than any joining of the flesh. 

He’d lost none of his ambitions over the years, but he had achieved none. He’d forged countless swords, helm, gauntlets, shields, and spears. The Fëanorions had an army to outfit, and while they had more craftsfolk than any of the other Elven realms, they also had higher standards and took the brunt of Morgoth’s poking gofer-head when the Dark One thought to test the strength of the Noldor’s siege. 

But he burned for more. His hands and mind were stifled here, in this black fortress. He’d plateaued, and that was unacceptable.

He had shared his desire to meet Maeglin with Maedhros. Maedhros had been the one to tell him of Maeglin and wet his appetite, but he warned Celebrimbor to caution if he sought Gondolin. Most of what Maedhros had imparted about Maeglin had come third-hand from Fingolfin who had learned it from Turgon when Turgon relayed the story of Aredhel’s death, for Maeglin had only spoken to Maedhros once. He had never returned to the Palantír to seek Maedhros out a second time. Maedhros said a darkness had crept into Gondolin, and Celebrimbor should be on his guard, they did not know what awaited him there. Celebrimbor would heed his uncle’s words, but his desire to meet Maeglin did not wane.

He tossed his reigns to the stable-hand, and sought out the Great Hall which was sure to be warm with the all its hearths lit. When he slipped through the heavy double doors, he was not expecting the bustle of activity that met him, or the noise of a hundred women chatting while their hands flew over their work. 

He pulled off his seal-skin cloak, walking over to one of the blazing hearths to drape the wet material over a nearby rack to dry. All the long tables had been pulled out as if a feast were being prepared. 

The hall was divided into stations, each cubic inch utilized. There were tables strewn with bolts of cloth, needles, yarn, with looms set up along the hall’s perimeter as if the women were mass-producing enough clothing to outfit an army. Women’s fingers were busy skillfully fletching arrow shafts and binding the steel heads that would pierce their men’s enemies. Others labored over the leather jerkins the Fëanorion archers wore, sewing the steel scales that would turn aside the slash of a sword from their loved one’s hearts. Others were set to the task of pickling beets, yams, eggs, herring, and carrots, others slicing the flesh from a kill and stringing it for smoking. He even spotted women wrapping perfectly crisped golden-brown lembas bread.

His brows crawled up when he spied the faces of noble-born women among the common. Their fine silks had been cast away for plain wool dresses with the sleeves rolled up, and their hair stripped of gems, bundled into knots at their necks. This must be important work indeed that loosened the tight reigns of class.

Celebrimbor approached one of the noble women, Lord Horthien’s wife. He waited while she finished giving instructions to Uir, one of the household servants, her voice confident, at ease with not only giving orders but also her environment. It was a reminder that this woman had not been born to the class she’d married into. 

Uir hurried off to fulfill the lady’s instructions, calling to one of only two other Wood-elves in the room in the language of the River-tribes as she went. Wood-elf servants were employed by a handful of the nobility, but the meat of the Wood-elf populace could be found in the army’s ranks or living out their lives like any other Noldo. The people of the Fëanorions had always preferred to accomplish tasks with their own two hands.

Lord Horthien’s wife turned to him, her work-roughened hands resting on her waist. Celebrimbor’s gaze dropped to the eight-pointed star resting in the hollow of her throat, hanging from a wide-width silver choker. He critiqued the workmanship and found it barely passable. The repoussé work was shoddy. The eight triangles were not even isosceles to his naked, though craftsmen’s, eye, and the obtuse angles weren’t raised enough while the acute lacked the delicacy of point a true master could have achieved. The planishing made his shoulders twitch, hands aching to take a hammer to the under-refined silver.

“My lord Celebrimbor,” she greeted him politely, but without a trace of the fawning he too often received that made him avoid his father’s court like a disease-ridden corpse. “How can I assist you?”

“I am new come from my uncle’s lands and would hear what passes here,” his hand swept out to encompass the tables. “This looks the preparation for war, yet I know there to be not even the rumor of one.”

“It is no war, my lord,” she said, swiping a wisp of auburn hair from her eyes. “The women make perpetration for the House of Haleth’s journey west. Lord Maedhros organized this labor so that we might gift the Edain with supplies and strengthen our alliance with them, one would presume.”

“Ah.” Yes, that did seem something Maedhros would do. Though Celebrimbor had heard no word of these plans, there was no surprise in that. Maedhros was always busy doing something: shoring up some alliance, analyzing how he could squeeze more profits out of the land and taxes in the coffers that funneled right back into the war. Understanding Maedhros’ mind would be like trying to comprehend a sleek, efficient machine; its gears and pulleys and leviers worked at a ferocious pace, far outstripping and out-plotting almost every other.

Celebrimbor _had_ heard of the Edain’s migration. Uncle Caranthir of all people had formed a friendship with one. The chieftess of the House of Haleth no less.

“Mother! Angadilion broke Rochallon!” A small child with sleek black hair ran up to Lord Horthien’s wife. His small hands presented a toy horse and its mutilated leg palm up as proof of the crime. Another boy with a shock of hair rivaling a ruby’s red, trailed after, sulkily complaining that it had been an accident.

“Erestor,” his mother sighed, picking up the toy horse and its leg, “what have we talked about, about solving things yourself?” the lady admonished gently.

Erestor frowned, worrying his lip, “That I should always try my words first.”

“Unless you are injured, yes.”

“But Rochallon is _broken_ ,” Erestor wailed. “And I told Angadilion not to try and ride him because he’s too big and Rochallon is not a _real_ horse, but he didn’t listen!”

“I didn’t mean too!” Angadilion protested.

“I want you both to go play,” the lady said.

“I don’t want to play with him anymore!” Erestor declared, shooting the other boy a glare from eyes so close to pure obsidian Celebrimbor was left musing on the possibilities of encasing light within black stone, wondering what such an experiment could achieve and if the result could reproduce the shining darkness of the boy’s eyes. “He broke Rochallon and he was my favorite horse _ever_.”

“Well that is too bad, Erestor,” his mother said calmly, “but it sounds like something you and Angadilion need to speak about yourselves. Maybe Angadilion has something he needs to say to you,” she shot Angadilion a pointed look that made the boy squirm, “And then you will need to decide if a broken toy is worth breaking your friendship over. Now go,” she pushed the boys gently back towards a corner several other children played in. 

Celebrimbor caught a mumbled “sorry” from Angadilion as they boys trooped away, and a piped, “All right then, do you still want to play knights with me?” 

The simple scene left a hollow feeling in Celebrimbor’s chest that he ruthlessly slew. He didn’t think about the fantasy brothers and sons of his uncles he wished had been born, or the absence of friendship in his life. A Fëanorion didn’t need friends. 

The determination to seek out his smith-loving cousin in Gondolin roped coils about his shoulders. A Fëanorion didn’t need friends, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have them if they came along (so long as friendship never came before blood). 

He found his father in Curufin’s study, fingers tapping an annoyed rhythm on his desk as he pursued a missive, the edges of the unrolled parchment showing the stains of travel. His father didn’t look up as the door closed behind Celebrimbor. 

Celebrimbor had not seen his father in years, but he didn’t even warrant a word of welcome. He crushed the self-pity like a bug. He was a Fëanorion, and Fëanorions didn’t wallow in self-pity.

The room Curufin had built to conduct the business of lordship in was as hard and unrepentant as its owner. There were no works of art on display or soft rugs matting the floor, all was the black stone the stronghold had been built from, and on the walls hung weapons: swords, spears, axes, bows, all displayed like trophies. 

Celebrimbor met the glass eyes of a mountain lion as he approached his father’s desk, choosing to remain standing for the coming confrontation. He’d never liked that stuffed head, but Curufin had killed the beast the year Celegorm and he had raised their fortress, and had been fascinated with the creatures ever since. Mountain lions were common in their lands, but there had been none in Valinor. 

“So, you have come home,” Curufin tossed the missive aside to fix Celebrimbor with a look as inviting as the distant moon.

Celebrimbor stuffed braces in his knees and a rod up his spine, “For a time,” he said with false casualness. “But I shall be leaving again. Within the month.”

“Oh?” Curufin asked with the appearance of disinterest (Celebrimbor hoped it was just appearance). 

“Yes. I travel to Gondolin.” The words fell into a pool of stillness. The glass eyes of the lion glinted in the light from the lit fireplace.

“No. I do not think so,” Curufin’s words sliced like blades.

Celebrimbor’s mouth flattened. “I am not asking your leave in this, Father. I have already made my decision.”

“You are _my_ son and you will obey me,” Curufin’s voice was a whip striking Celebrimbor in the cheek, but he did not turn with the blow.

“I am your son, but I am also well passed my majority. You are not the master of my life. I desire to go to Gondolin, so I shall.” He could never bear to anger his father, and hated that look of wildness kindling in his father’s eyes. 

Celebrimbor turned away, taking quick strides to the door. It wasn’t a matter of reasoning with his father or seeking his blessing. He’d informed his father of his plans, but there was no winning an argument with Curufin. 

He’d almost reached the door when a hand gripped his elbow, spinning him around. “Your place if here. With _me_.” Celebrimbor would have shaken the hand off, but while his father’s voice chafed like sandpaper against his tongue, his eyes were vulnerable as Celebrimbor had not seen them in decades. The vulnerability was snuffed out as quickly as it had come, the ice re-freezing, but Celebrimbor had seen it and would not forget.

His father was still in there, somewhere. Buried under a loadstone of barriers and a feverish devotion to Grandfather’s memory, but Curufin was still there. 

Curufin convinced even himself that he didn’t need anyone or anything but the Oath and the memory of a Spirit of Fire, but it was all lies. His father turned a cold shoulder against him over and over, but every time Curufin threw his family away he reeled them back in again. He said he didn’t need them, but he did. 

Celebrimbor _knew_ his father. This man, the man who loved him though he might be terrified of showing it. He knew what his father feared most, and it was being alone, pushing them all away one too many times and having none come back to him. 

His father was terrified of being left, like Nerdanel and Fëanor and Celebrimbor’s mother had left him. That was who Curufin was: a proud, perilous fire that would consume you before you ever felt its warm, and a secretly frightened little boy underneath. It was why Celebrimbor could never really leave, no matter how much rage and resentment his father’s unrelenting grip about his neck drove him to. He always came back because Curufin needed him just as much as he needed Curufin.

But he had to go. It was enough to know his father was still in there, enough to bring him back again. “It will only be for a few seasons, and then I will come home,” he promised, holding his father’s eyes though it made him feel like he’d cast himself upon a bed of glacier rocks.

“A son’s place is at his father’s side.”

Celebrimbor didn’t have to hear more to know his inconsistent presence at his father’s side was being measured against Curufin’s devotion to Fëanor and falling far far short. _Not everyone could love their fathers more than their own sons,_ Celebrimbor thought with bitterness, but he quickly quenched it. He wasn’t going to walk that path. He wasn’t going to let his father birth bitterness in him. 

“Let him go, Curufin,” Celebrimbor turned to see Celegorm’s lean figure leaning against the door post. Celegorm’s gaze had a hunting panther’s lazy-eyed danger. His eyes were like the secret parts of the ocean, a green that knew no bottom. “Celebrimbor will come back. He always comes back. He just wants to see the world, what is the harm?”

“He is being disobedient,” Curufin snapped, but dropped his hold on Celebrimbor’s arm. 

Celegorm arched a brow, “Well he is not a child you can throw over your knee anymore, or,” and here Celegorm’s face darkened and the look he pierced Curufin with was warning, “a dog to beat to your will.”

Curufin blanched. “I have never laid a hand on Curufinwë!” The shadow of Celebrimbor’s mother floated through the room. Her lip was painted with a dribble of blood from where Curufin’s backhand had struck her to the floor.

“See that you do not.” It was not an accusation or a threat, but a reminder to Curufin not to forget who he was. 

Curufin glared at Celegorm, but there was no one else who could temper Curufin’s wrath like Celegorm, though Curufin never went down without a fight for anyone. “I will thank you to let me handle my own son. You can stick to your dogs, brother, as I doubt you will have much need to perfect parenting skills now _she_ went and got herself poisoned to death. It is unfortunate her spawn is male, or you could have tried again with it.” Curufin’s words were acidic and fanged as serpent’s teeth. The idea of softening the blows because of love and blood never occurred to him. 

“It is equally unfortunate you could not do better than one,” Celegorm’s green eyes had darkened with a sunburst of rage, and his voice shook with the power of the violence he suppressed to spew out in words. “You know Father always wanted more grandchildren, and there you were, his favorite, who failed him so spectacularly. But then, you never did amount to much in the forge, did you?”

Angrist came out, a flash of black steel in Curufin’s hand as he slashed at Celegorm’s chest, but Celegorm was already dancing away, nimble as a doe. They did a strange dance about each other, Curufin lunging and Celegorm twirling away, an ecstatic grin on Celegorm’s face as if this were all a game. And it was, really. It didn’t matter that Curufin had drawn Angrist and seemed intent on causing Celegorm lasting harm, Celebrimbor had seen one-too-many arguments of theirs end in bloodied faces and broken furniture with them both side-by-side not an hour later to think either would ever harm the other, not even blinded by rage when they were both at their most perilous.

Curufin threw Angrist at Celegorm who ducked. The dagger sliced a lock of pale hair off in its path to the wall. Celegorm laughed and charged Curufin, bowling them both over onto the floor where they landed with an ‘ugh’ from Curufin on the hard stones. They didn’t wrestle long before they lay, brow pressed to brow, both panting and staring into the other’s eyes, everything forgiven and forgotten in that one look.

Celegorm rolled off the floor first with a groan, stretching his back before offering Curufin a hand up. Curufin rubbed the back of his shoulders with a dark glare at Celegorm for giving him bruises. Celegorm grinned back with teeth, and made a crude gesture with his hand that had Curufin rolling his eyes.

Curufin, in a calmer mood now, appraised his son’s silent figure that watched back. “Very well,” he conceded. “You have my permission to seek Gondolin, _but_ ” because even if Curufin had twisted it to make it look like Celebrimbor had been seeking his permission and not telling him he was going, Curufin still just had to lay down restrictions, “I want you back here in five winters, not another longer.”

Celebrimbor knew when to pick up a fight and when to lay it down with his father. “As you say, Father,” he agreed, and the lingering harsh lines unfolded from Curufin’s face. He looked almost approvingly upon his son.

*

Celebrimbor was remarkably like his father, Celegorm thought. They both had the ambition of their blood-line. It ran deep and rich as diamond veins in the mountains of the world. Their objectives were completely different though, which negated the similarities they shared. 

Curufin was bound by the Oath, finding purpose in the aspiration of its fulfillment and unleashing the vengeance that consumed him upon Morgoth’s flesh. Celebrimbor’s ambition wasn’t fame, though he did crave acknowledgement of his talent, he was driven from a hope of gaining Curufin’s elusive approval more than all the recognition in the world. 

Celebrimbor didn’t know what he wanted from life. But whatever he chose he would achieve it. Celebrimbor was like his father in this, driven, and possessing a dangerous tunnel-vision in the pursuit of his goals. Curufin was the son most like their father, and Celebrimbor was more alike his father and grandfather than just the skill of his hands. All three were given to obsessions.

The rain had let up, though the sky still hung low and dark over the lands, and it would undoubtedly shower in the night. The wind grabbed handfuls of Celegorm’s loose hair and raked cold fingers through it, tossing it over the battlements like reapers throwing baskets of grains into the wind. 

Celegorm forwent the traditional Noldorin braids, choosing to leave his hair unbound and wild but for the two simple braids holding its thickness from his eyes. He didn’t care what others said about his similarities to the Wood-elf tribes of Thargelion. He was going to pick up gossip as a prince regardless, and he liked his hair thus and had always wore it so, even in Valinor. 

Banners bearing Curufin’s crest snapped in the hellish breeze, the stars of Fëanor winking at him from fields of blood-red. His own stars were set in a field of green, and accompanied by a white hound. Their banners flew side-by-side. 

Celebrimbor leaned against the battlements beside him, staring sightlessly down into the plunge of black walls and nearly vertical cliffs below. Celegorm had snagged his nephew’s arm and skillfully evicted them both from Curufin’s presence. Celegorm knew Curufin’s heart like the twin of his own, and discerned it was high-time Celebrimbor left his father to sort himself out and accept his son’s imminent departure in private. Curufin was as crippled emotionally as Caranthir, and just as terrible at dealing with matters of the heart. 

Celebrimbor wanted Curufin to be something he wasn’t anymore. Curufin had been what Celebrimbor wanted once, but that person had eroded away until nothing but the hardiest granite remained. The person Curufin was now would cut off his own hand before he let anyone see passed the impervious face he presented the world and into the soft crevices of his heart.

“So, Gondolin?” Celegorm asked of his brooding nephew. Celebrimbor sighed, the sound weary and seeping into Celegorm’s flesh with hooks of worry. “He will be there to see you off, you know. And whatever he says, there will not be a moment you are gone he does not miss you.” He placed a hand on Celebrimbor’s shoulder, squeezing the hard muscle and bone.

“Will he?” Celebrimbor’s voice folded with doubt, yet wrapped in the hope of a son craving the promise of his father’s love.

Celegorm waited until the silence drew Celebrimbor’s eyes up to his: “Yes. He will.”

“I wish I could be so sure,” Celebrimbor’s brow creased. “He has changed.”

“We all have.”

“I wish—”

“Don’t.” The word was like an axe fall across the thought, yet not sharp. It didn’t have to be. Celebrimbor knew the danger of such thoughts. They didn’t speak of Before: of dreams turned to ashes, of those gone beyond reach, lost, forever. Regrets were a cancer they couldn’t afford to feed.

“You are right. I was being foolish,” Celebrimbor’s words were so soft the wind almost swallowed them.

“Come,” Celegorm pushed away from the battlements. It was a depressing place, facing the North and the Vala they each secretly doubted they would ever overthrow. 

Celebrimbor followed him into the solar, both glad to be in from the chill of approaching dusk. The room’s walls were paneled in dark woods, the iron-pained windows gleaning little light from the overcast sky, and the hearth was cold. Celegorm knelt on the flagstones, gathering kindling and arranging it with practiced fingers.

“So, you want to tell me what is in Gondolin?” Celegorm asked, picking up the flint stones and sticking them sharply together with a crack.

Celebrimbor folded himself up on the upholstered couch, the wood creaking under his tall, solid weight. His nephew looked strangely childlike with his leg tucked under him and arms crossed across chest. “You have to promise not to tell Father.”

Celegorm grinned at the embers he was coaxing to life. He’d once shared many little secrets with his nephew, back when he’d been a child and Celegorm his favorite uncle. The request made him feel young and carefree again. “If you wish.” He piled logs over the hungry little flame, the handful of dry grasses eagerly consumed and spat out in curls of smoke.

Celebrimbor still hesitated another moment before: “It is Aredhel’s son. He is there.”

The grin turned to ice on his face. Aredhel. The name had not crossed his lips since she’d betrayed him. When they’d brought news of her death there had been one long moment falling into eternity when he’d shattered into a million pieces inside his cleaved heart, before he turned to his brothers’ concerned eyes, his own flat, and said: “Aredhel? I know no one by that name.”

Celebrimbor was watching him now, gaze hot across the rigid lines of Celegorm’s body. “He called Maedhros on the Palantír. Maedhros says he is a smith.” Celegorm could hear the shrug in Celebrimbor’s voice. Well, what else was there to say? Of course Celebrimbor would be drawn to a cousin who favored forge-work. And given the way Curufin had been withdrawing from his son, and holding him down under his control like a child forced under water and thrashing against giant hands, the only surprise was Celebrimbor had agreed to only five years with this new cousin. 

“The boy—” He slammed his throat shut on the thought (madness). 

(Maeglin. Her son. The child that could have been his in another world. A world where Aredhel was someone she was not. He wanted to know if the boy had her eyes, her indomitable spirit, and the fine bones of her hands that used to slip though his hair after they made love. He wanted to know if the boy was his mother’s in form and spirit. He wanted to know if a piece of Aredhel still lived within the boy.)

He said nothing. He didn’t know anyone named Aredhel. A boy named Maeglin was nothing to him. Not even if he had grey eyes, the cageless spirit of a blackbird, and hair like the black breath between stars.

He felt cold. The heat of the newborn fire licked his face, but could not sink into his bones. 

A wet nose poked through the door, before massive shoulders followed. Huan’s tongue lulled, black-velvet eyes seeking Celegorm out. Celegorm held out a hand, calling the hound to his side. Huan padded over, his huge body toppling a chair in his eagerness to reach the hand promising a starch behind his ears. Celebrimbor smiled at the sight of the hound stretching out before the crackling fire, pressing his belly into the thrush mats spread over the floor.

“Did you wrangle the secret of Gondolin out of our _lovely_ aunt Irimë?” Celegorm asked, resting his head against Huan’s belly, and stretched long legs across the mats. His hair trailed carelessly on the floor in creamy waves. He turned his cheek into the hound’s white belly. He was so hollow. He needed the warmth of a friend to blaze away this coldness.

Huan’s thump-thump-thumping heartbeat drove away the shadows from his heart like a dog chasing away creeping rats from a baby’s cradle. Huan licked his cheek, sensing the thoughts disturbing his friend and seeking to banish them with his loyal love. Celegorm’s chilled features melted into a smile like a slice of the brilliant moon’s belly. He scratched behind the great hound’s ears, earning a few more happy nips.

“No, thank the Light, I did not have to be the one to do it,” Celebrimbor made a face at the thought of having to be civil to Irimë long enough to get what he wanted out of her. “Maglor got her to tell him.”

“No doubt Turgon will be ecstatic to welcome a Fëanorion into his realm, and even more to hear Irimë is passing secrets.”

“He will be informed of poor Irimë’s worry over her son’s wellbeing, such that she couldn’t rest without news of him.”

Celegorm barked a laugh. “Clever. And Irimë will not be able to tell him differently. But you had still better prepare yourself for a cold welcome and sleep with a dagger under your pillow. Take a guard with you as well, pick from our best and loyalist fighters and do not go anywhere in Gondolin without them. I do not doubt there are more than a few of Turgon’s folk who would like to pay a Fëanorion back for the Helcaraxë.”

“I am not a child, Uncle,” Celebrimbor reminded, “Nor a fool. I remember quite well how much Turgon _cares_ for Fëanorions.”

“We cannot help seeing you as our little nephew,” Celegorm tried to sooth. “I would be just as over-protective with any of my brothers. Well, not Maedhros,” he amended.

“Caranthir?” Celebrimbor raised a disbelieving brow.

Celegorm snorted at the thought of the tongue-lashing Caranthir would have subjected him to if he’d tried to baby him. “No, not Caranthir. But Maglor and the twins, definitely.”

“Only because they are the only ones who would not try to maim you.”

“Maedhros would not maim me,” Celegorm argued back half-heartedly. Maim? No. Look at him like an idiot? Most definitely. 

“Well, I can take care of myself,” Celebrimbor said without a trace of the sulky, injured pride a true child would have demonstrated. Yet more proof Celebrimbor could, in fact, navigate life without the protection of his father and uncles’ sword-crossed wings cocooning him.

“Yes, I suppose you can,” Celegorm answered softly. He didn’t know how he felt about the revelation that Celebrimbor didn’t need them anymore. Proud, but also adrift. It opened the doors on too many rooms of memory, memories he couldn’t afford to indulge. His nephew wasn’t a child anymore, and they were suffocating him by continuing to treat him as such. He hoped Curufin experienced the same realization before he pushed his son too far one too many times. 

“Well, I hope you find what you are looking for in Gondolin,” Celegorm said, rising. Huan pushed himself to his paws after him, the hound’s head butting against his chest. “I shall look for your return. We will blow the trumpets when we see your coming, and the valley will ring with joy. Curufin will be at the gates to welcome you. Of that I promise.” He couldn’t help ruffling Celebrimbor’s hair as he passed, and amazingly his nephew didn’t swat him away.

“You always were my favorite uncle,” the words were soft. 

“And you are my favorite nephew,” Celegorm touched Celebrimbor’s cheek. “Keep your chin up. It is not as dark as it seems. We still have each other, and that is all that matters in the end. No Darkness is too deep to pierce, no Oath or vengeance so strong it can sever our bonds.” 

Celegorm wished he could believe his own words, but they were only lies to comfort. He could feel it falling apart around him, and he helpless to stop the decay set in his family like grout in a soldier’s heels. They’d lost Father, and only half of Maedhros had come back from the Darkness. Nothing had been the same since. And now Curufin was slipping away, piece by piece into the Oath’s embrace. 

There were powers in this world that could break a Fëanorion. Powers greater than he. He could do no more than stand at his brothers’ shoulders, hand upon sinews and muscles he was trying desperately to keep breathing, shield at their backs, and steadfast heart too stubborn to let the darkness of oaths, Dark Gods, and vengeance push them over the brink. 

But when Celebrimbor nodded, a small smile on his face, Celegorm knew it wouldn’t be this day the Oath drove Celebrimbor from them. His nephew would be back. Celebrimbor always came home.

*

Celebrimbor despised Gondolin after only two days, but he did not regret his decision to come here. 

Back home, he buried himself in the forge. He could spend weeks, months, consumed by a project and never have to surface enough to confront the world he lived in. When he was lost in the paths of creation, he did not have to think about his father slipping away, or the war, or the Oath. 

But there was a line. A line between seeking release from unhappiness, and running so far away he lost himself in the running. There was a line, and at some point he’d fallen onto the wrong side of it. 

He didn’t regret coming to Gondolin because it woke him up. No one could walk the streets of Gondolin and not be appalled by what they saw. But then, the Gondolindrim did walk them every day, and did nothing to change what their own racist laws and society had created.

Celebrimbor turned left at the crossroads, weaving around laboring Wood-elves, noblemen’s covered liters, and street venders. The air was sweet with the scent of roses for which this alley had been named. Vines of white, yellow, pink, and red roses twined like an arched roof over the street, and the houses and fences bordering the alley were likewise crawling with vines shaped into canopies and blooming columns. 

Gondolin had a beautiful façade, but maggots feasted on her innards. The sweet smell of roses was like an executioner come straight from the gallows and dabbing perfume behind her ears, trying to conceal the stench of death.

Celebrimbor had been in Gondolin two days and had yet to speak with Maeglin. His forge-loving cousin was as much a recluse as Celebrimbor was in Himlad, and Celebrimbor had been tied down by a court and king set off like a stabbed hornet’s nest with his coming. Only a deaf and blind man wouldn’t have seen the fury in Turgon’s eyes and heard the barely concealed threat in his voice when Celebrimbor was brought before him by the guards of the Hidden Way. 

Celebrimbor wasn’t afraid of Turgon’s anger, though its birth from fear made it unpredictable. But Turgon would have to be the worst kind of fool to kill a Fëanorion. Celebrimbor had spared no words when telling Turgon exactly where he stood: Maedhros had the location of Gondolin, Celebrimbor had one of the lesser Palantíri, and his father would be expecting frequent assurances of his son’s wellbeing (Turgon did not need to know that the eye of a lesser Palantír could not stretch all the miles to Himlad). So if Turgon did not want a host of vengeful Fëanorions at his door, he’d best keep his hands off this one.

The entrance to the House of the Wolf was a set of steel-enforced, black walnut doors. There was no grand garden of artistically perfected flower beds, little paths, and tinkling fountains leading up the House of the Wolf’s door as so many other lords’ houses boasted. There was a step. A cut block of marble was the only thing keeping the house’s entrance from overflowing into the lane. Celebrimbor found the simplicity refreshing. 

A Wood-elf opened the door. The woman’s lobs were heavy with iron, but her hair was neatly braided and she wore a clean, well-made, if simple, cotton dress. It was her eyes that drew his notice though. They didn’t possess that hollowness haunting far too many eyes in this city of tomb-stones. 

“Yes?” she looked at him through narrowed eyes, sizing him up. “What are you calling for?” There was no subservience in her voice, no hushed whisper and rush to meet the Noldo’s needs. It was the first time since entering this city that a Wood-elf had spoken to him from the mouth of a person who understood they were a human being deserving of respect. 

“I am here to see Prince Maeglin. Is he at home?”

“Is my lord expecting you?” 

“No.”

She looked him up and down. “My lord is a busy man, what business shall I tell him you are calling for? I would make it good if I were you. He does not like to be interrupted from his work in the forge, especially to come to a Golodh’s call.”

“I…I wished to meet him.”

Her brow lifted. “Is that so? Now why is that?”

“Because he is my cousin.”

She frowned at him. “No you are not. I know all of my lords so-called family members.”

He felt like he was under interrogation. “I have only just arrived in Gondolin, two days ago.”

She eyed him another moment, and then stepped back, holding the door open for him. It seemed he passed her test. He stepped in. “Come with me,” she beckoned him to follow.

The entrance hall spilled into a grassy courtyard that seemed to be the heart of the house. Three stories of covered balconies wrapped around it. No gaudy molds, festoons of gold, or columns heavy with friezes could be found. There was the white marble the city’s buildings seemed to be crafted from exclusively, but it was interspersed with black basalt rocks that lent a pleasing contrast. And, without the heavy gold infesting so much of Gondolin and tipping what might have been tasteful architecture into the ostentation, the House of the Wolf had achieved the cool, sleek feel of a wolf’s pelt, with the softness of a garden at its heart. 

The garden courtyard burst with activity. At least fifty Wood-elves sat on colorful blankets or before looms, all busy with industry. It reminded him of walking into his father’s hall and finding it packed with women hard at work. 

These Wood-elves were either set to the business of cloth-making, or turning the cloth into clothing as they chatted on the blankets. There were piles of finished clothing dotting the grass. All the pieces were simple, but sewn with care. 

Celebrimbor asked, “What is all this for?”

His guide turned him a look over her shoulder, a smile curled proud as a hawk in the corner of her mouth. “My lord Maeglin provides.” With that she turned her back and took him circling around the courtyard, following the ground floor balcony to the house’s back arm, and out into a small, walled yard that reminded him of a Fëanorion’s house. The courtyard was dedicated to creation. 

The woman approached the forge that spilled the steady sounds of a creation in progress: the clank clank clank of metal striking metal and the hissing of the bellows. This close to the forge, Celebrimbor was bathed in the familiar acidic tang of metal and the heavy scent of smoke. “Maeglin, a Golodh has come calling claiming he is your cousin fresh-arrived to Gondolin. Do you want to see him, or shall I turn him out?”

“Fine, fine,” came the reply, the sounds of a hammer hitting alloy never pausing. The voice carried the distraction of a mind deep in the labor of creation, something Celebrimbor was intimately familiar with.

Before she could interpret the absentminded response as permission to turn him out onto the street, Celebrimbor ducked under the low hanging beam and into the dimness of a forge lit only by a banked fire in the pit. Its sizzling embers glowed like red and grey hearts. Maeglin worked alone, a leather apron tied around his waist and looped about his neck. Hair so black it soaked into the memory of two other smiths’ ebony manes flashed in Celebrimbor’s mind.

The muscles in Maeglin’s shoulders and right arm bunched and slithered under the steady bang bang of the forging, while his left hand kept the blade parallel to the anvil to keep the forging even and crisp. He did not look up as Celebrimbor approached to get a better look at the piece he was working on. 

It was blade, a long one. Celebrimbor recognized the alloy having worked with it himself numerous times: steel infused with Mithril. Pure Mithril wasn’t malleable enough for sword forging, the metal more likely to snap than yield to a razor’s edge. 

Maeglin was close to the normalizing. The billet of steel had been soldered with the Mithril, and the tang hammered out first. Maeglin had already finished the monotonous stage of drawing out the blade, making it longer and thinner, and was now beveling it. It was delicate work. Not the most delicate, but Maeglin had laid down the heavier hammer and taken up a smaller as he brought out the sword’s spine by thinning the edges. 

Celebrimbor wandered to a work table where his eye caught on the gleam of polished steel. Laid out were a collection of blades in varying stages of grinding and sanding, some still wearing the scales of post-normalization, others far enough along to see the hollow grind Maeglin was pulling from the metal. Celebrimbor picked up a finished blade, its guard, hilt, and pommel already added to make a piece of aesthetic perfection. 

The grind was serpentine along the dagger’s blade, a ribbon of Tengwar following its path. The work was so fine Celebrimbor was tempted to place the finished dagger upon a stand for admiration, but that would be a waste of such exquisite craftsmanship. This blade was born to be used, and thirsted for its first bite of Orc-blood to bath its virgin steel.

He ran his fingertips along the metal, tracing the Tengwar. He closed his eyes and listened to the blade’s song, searching for the melody of its future battles. The name it would one day wear proud as any long sword’s came to him: Sting. The dagger hummed its approval in his hands. 

He turned back to Maeglin, admiration for his cousin’s skill ridding his chest. “This is beautiful work.”

Maeglin’s head came up at his voice. He put his hammer aside to push the eye coverings from his face. The safety glasses resembled those worn by Fëanorion smiths, with the same wide lenses of glass, but the arms and bridge were copper. Maeglin shoved the glasses into his hair, then wiped the back of a gloved hand over a sweaty brow and fastened dark, wary eyes on Celebrimbor. “Who are you?” the words came with bite.

“Celebrimbor Fëanorion. Your cousin.”

Maeglin’s eyes widened, face breaking open to reveal surprise, before it snapped closed again and he dragged guarded eyes up and down Celebrimbor’s body. “I heard of your coming. It caused quite a stir. Your blood is not well liked in most corners of this city.”

Celebrimbor lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I did not come here to forge alliances, nor would I or any of my family wish to build them with such people as Turgon’s following.” He lifted the dagger, “This is truly superior work. Where did you learn it?”

It seemed to be the wrong question because the suspicion crystallized in Maeglin’s eyes. “My father,” he answered, eyes cold.

“He must have been skilled indeed.”

“He was my better. I have never met his equal, not among all the smiths of Gondolin,” Maeglin answered as if awaiting a strike.

Celebrimbor set the dagger down, ignoring the crouching confrontation in the words. He traced the spine of another blade, this one long and slender and infused with the shine of Mithril. Its forging was complete and awaited only a guard, handle, and pommel. The sword was gilded with runes running in blocks of geometric shapes down its blade. “Glamdring,” he read. “This will be a mighty weapon. Does it have an owner yet?”

Maeglin abandoned his anvil to snatch the gleaming blade from Celebrimbor’s hands, the worn leather of his work gloves brushing against Celebrimbor’s admiring fingers. “Yes. Turgon commissioned it,” the words sounded like they knifed his throat on the way out.

“And the one you forge now?”

Something like rebellion or maybe spite nestled in the curve of Maeglin’s mouth: “Ecthelion. The king commissioned it as well.”

 _And you could not refuse your liege lord no matter how much you hate the swords’ recipients_ , Celebrimbor finished what Maeglin left unsaid. 

With this topic exhausted, a stiff silence slinked in between them. It was rather hard to go about forming a friendship when he’d never had one before and didn’t know how to start. He didn’t know what to say, so he started talking about his own work. “Weapons are not my specialty. Jewel-smithing and objects of Power, these I find the greatest pleasure in. I have a project I am working on now…” 

Here was the delicate part, because to speak the word ‘Silmaril’ was to lay down the dead, cold weight of a corpse across the floor. So he said instead, “I was thinking of ways to capture the light of a star in a glass.”

He wanted this for his father. It was his father’s obsession with the Silmarils that pushed him to achieve what only Fëanor had accomplished: capturing Light. For it was not as he told Maeglin; he did not wish to capture the light of a star, but of the stolen Silmarils. He wanted to cage a bit of their brilliance and place it into Curufin’s hands so that when the Oath sunk deep and cruel into his father, he could hold that bit of the Silmarils in his hands, pressed against his breast, and he might find a measure of relief.

The Silmarils were stolen. Their light lost to the eye, but they lived inside Celebrimbor’s memories, in his blood. The Silmarils were pieces of Fëanor, and Fëanor’s blood ran in Celebrimbor’s veins. If Celebrimbor could pull this distant, but not sundered, light up, through his blood and memories and seal it in crystal, his father’s enslavement to the Oath might yet ease for a time. He would hand his father a piece of Fëanor again, which was all Curufin had ever wanted.

“I have never heard of such a thing,” Maeglin said, but not with doubt.

Celebrimbor ran an idle hand over the blades spread out of the workbench. “A Star-glass, I shall name it.”

Maeglin made a sound in the back of his throat, and turned from the worktable to take up his cooled forging. “I have work to finish. You may see yourself out.”

Celebrimbor did not know how to go about forging friendships, but thought sharing a task was a place to start, so when Maeglin’s hand reached out to pump the bellows, Celebrimbor’s hand found the handle first. “Let me do that.” 

Suspicion etched Maeglin’s face. “What do you want?”

“I thought that we might...as we are cousins, we might…spend time together?”

But his clumsy words only hardened Maeglin’s face. “Ah, share a dinner? Some wine after? Be _friends_.”

“I…that is not disagreeable to me.”

“Tell me, _cousin_ , how many Wood-elves slave away in your father’s lands? Serving _honorable_ lords?”

A frown beat Celebrimbor’s brow. “It is _nothing _like Gondolin. There are no mountains caging anyone in. Some Wood-elves have sought _employment_ from Noldor, and can leave whenever they choose. And it is not—yes, there are some Noldor who mistreat Wood-elves, but those are the kind of people who are given to cruelty, and there are laws against mistreated. My family are fair and just lords—” __

__“How many Wood-elf chieftains sit at your _fair_ and _just_ father’s council? How many rule their own lands with Golodhrim serving under _them_?” _ _

__Maeglin’s eyes dug into the bones of Celebrimbor’s face like he wanted to crush them in. “None. But—”_ _

__“But _nothing_. A Golodh would never allow a Wood-elf to sit above him in authority.”_ _

__“No,” Celebrimbor shook his head. Abuses did occur, but it wasn’t like _Gondolin_. “There are Wood-elves who command authority over Noldor. In the army, or employed under them in shops they own, or in the branches of a city’s governances they have been appointed to. Maybe there are no Wood-elves seated around my father’s highest councils, but there are in my uncles.’ As for land ownership, it’s _complicated._ No, Wood-elves do not own great swaths of land in my father’s lands, but those are _Fëanorion_ lands. The Wood-elves have their own lands which they rule and no Noldo sits at their councils.” _ _

__Maeglin’s face did not soften from its taut, hard lines. “The rot may not have sunk as deep a root, but it is there, hidden perhaps from _polite_ society, but casting its long, infested shadow into all the corners.”_ _

__Celebrimbor wanted to deny it, but had witnessed instances of thoughtless or even intentional prejudice. But it was _nothing_ like Gondolin. It was not institutionalized, and when a case of abuse was brought before his father or one of his uncles they _were_ fair and just._ _

__The silence lengthened, and Maeglin’s lip curled, showing tooth like a wolf’s snarl. “Leave. And take your _friendship_ with you. I will never be friends with a Golodh.” _ _

__Celebrimbor walked to the forge’s threshold. There he paused and looked back. Maeglin felt his gaze from the tightening of his shoulders, but ignored him, picking up his work. Celebrimbor watched as Maeglin finished beveling the blade into perfect symmetry._ _

__He still had not left when Maeglin picked up a poker and stirred the coals, placing the blade into a pocket of ash-white embers and pilling the burning coals atop the metal for the normalizing. The blade would nestle in the bank of coals, softening up, until all the stress burned out of the metal. Maeglin continued to pretend Celebrimbor had already stopped hovering at his door._ _

__Celebrimbor turned away as Maeglin beat a lazy pump on the blows, bringing the fire’s heat up for the normalizing. He made his way out of the House of the Wolf, feeling eyes watching him through every step, all as untrusting as their lord. He stepped out onto the street that smelled of roses, but underneath, like the reek of a sewer hidden under city streets, the stench of oppression festered._ _

__He looked back over his shoulder at the house that held the reason for his coming here. Maeglin may reject his friendship until the very end, but unless he showed himself to be a man Celebrimbor would not wish to call friend, Celebrimbor would keep trying. He’d set his mind on it, and liked what he’d found, cold and sharp as his reception had been. Even in his hatred, there was something honest and clean about Maeglin. He was no sycophant, snob, or degenerate, but an honorable man. And one Celebrimbor would like to call friend._ _


	46. Chapter 41

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 41

Celebrimbor showed up on Maeglin’s doorstep the next day with a curse tucked under his tongue for the flinch in the Wood-elf’s eyes when she brought him his breakfast, and the boot that had kicked another Wood-elf on the street when one of his mistress’ purchases tumbled off the teetering stack he’d had to balance in his arms. 

Celebrimbor had walked over to that lady’s Noldo guard and kicked him in the back of the knees, dropping him into the street’s pavement. A blow for a blow. It had done nothing to release the Wood-elf from the service of a cruel mistress though. It had done nothing but balm his own inflamed conscience, but he couldn’t just walk by and pretend nothing had happened. If he was home, he would have dragged that man and the lady before his father for justice and known the Wood-elf would have received it. But there was no justice in Gondolin.

Celebrimbor knocked, and a different woman let him in today. She recognized him from yesterday’s visit though, so he was spared the interrogation and led into a receiving room. The room did not have a single window. The wall facing the street was solid as a fortress.’ But the room was not oppressive in the absence of sunlight, for the soft lamplight slid like wine over the cool marble walls and mosaic floor.

The woman said, “My lord Maeglin is occupied in the forge. It might be hours yet before he is free to see you. You could wait, or see yourself out now.”

She looked like was wanted to pounce on him and drag him out of the house. It was obvious which option she wanted him to choose. Celebrimbor wondered how many –if any—Noldo in Gondolin called on the House of the Wolf. 

“I will wait.” 

Her mouth pursed. He chose one of the chairs that looked like an experiment in furniture design and sat down. She stood in the doorway. Her hands curled into balls as if readying herself to punch him. He looked away, examining the mosaic in the wall opposite him, a geometric design achieved in black, white, and silver, the color palette for the rest of the mosaics in the room as well.

She left. He seriously doubted she was on her way to inform Maeglin of his calling. He idled around the room for a half-hour then peered out the door. He sensed no eyes keeping a guard on the receiving room’s door, so he stepped through into the entry hall. No one emerged to stop him as he turned not for the door to the street, but the one leading into the grassy courtyard.

He stepped out onto the balcony opening into the courtyard. The sight that greeted him curled a wry smile in his mouth. Maeglin was not in the forge at all, but here in the courtyard teaching a boy the bow. They had set up a makeshift archery range between the trees and fountain. It served well enough for a beginner. 

Celebrimbor crossed his arms, hip shifting into a casual stance, and settled in to watch.

*

“Do I have it right?” 

Maeglin wrapped his fingers over Legolas’ on the bow, adjusting the boy’s grip. “That is better.”

Legolas drew the arrow back to his ear. It took a few more moments to steady his aim. The bow was child-sized, light enough for slim muscle to draw, and the target was only twenty feet out. Legolas still had a long way to go.

“No, don’t hold your breath,” Maeglin corrected. He rested his palm against the boy’s stomach, arms snaking under the raised bow. “That is it,” he encouraged, feeling Legolas take a few steady breaths. “Breathe with it. Loose the arrow on the exhale.”

There was a twang and the slap of the bowstring striking against Legolas’ guard. The arrow flew like an uncertain bird through the air, lacking that strength and confidence an experienced archer could infuse it with, but striking the target’s third ring. Not bad.

Legolas spun, grinning, eyes shining, “Did you see? Did you see?”

“Yes, I saw,” Maeglin’s voice straddled a laugh. “Again,” he turned the boy, hands slipping from Legolas’ shoulders to adjust the width of his stance. “Yes, like that.” He had to loosen the boy’s grip again, feeling the tension still riding high in the bunched muscles of his shoulders. “Relax,” he bent to whisper in Legolas’ ear. “She is not going to hurt you,” he smoothed a hand over the bow’s curve. “Arrow is your friend, do not pinch him so. He gets testy if you do.”

Legolas giggled, upsetting his balance, but the laugh was just what he needed to uncoil the nervousness from his shoulders.

“That is it,” Maeglin let his hands drop, taking a step back. He wanted Legolas to associate success with his own merits, not the voice whispering instructions in his ear. “She will tell you when she is ready. Listen.” He made his own breathing long and deep. “Do you hear her calling?” 

Legolas stilled, listening for the bow’s readiness, eyes narrowed as he concentrated and sighted down the shaft. Twang. Thump. The arrow vibrated in the target’s innermost circle. Not a bull’s eye, but a beautiful shot. 

Legolas jumped with a shout, holding his bow aloft as he twirled to share his victory. “I did it!”

“An excellent shot.” Maeglin let out an oof as Legolas barreled into him like a sack of sharp elbows and knobby knees with an unfortunately pointy bow. But Legolas was laughing, eyes dancing like playful fireflies. 

Maeglin gave Legolas a loose hug, free in his affection for the child, for they were safe in the sanctuary of the House of the Wolf. But then his eyes slipped over Legolas’ head and snagged on an intruder lurking in the shadows, spying on them.

He disentangled himself from Legolas, pushing Legolas behind the shelter of his body, but it was too late. Celebrimbor had seen. Legolas’ bare ears were damning enough without the forbidden weapon in his hand. If Celebrimbor went to Turgon with this…even a casual word slipped from his mouth, and retribution would fall upon the House of the Wolf. If Turgon knew Maeglin was secretly breaking the laws inside these walls, would he invade them with Golodhrim guards, or even tear them down? Would Legolas be pried from his home and his mother’s arms to have a work contract drawn up and passed into the hands of animals?

Maeglin _must_ ensure Celebrimbor’s silence. He said sharply in the Star Tongue: “Go to your mother, Legolas.” 

Legolas knew better than to argue when Maeglin used that tone, but he did take a moment to stare at Celebrimbor. He’d never met a full-blooded Golodh before. But he obeyed, and darted back into the house proper. With Legolas gone, some of the tension loosened from Maeglin’s body, but it was only the relaxing of a warrior preparing for a fight. 

“You are a good teacher of the bow,” Celebrimbor said as if he’d not been spying on them and captured a secret that could destroy the lives of every soul in this house, and all the ones living on the mountain too if Turgon stripped Maeglin of his House and lordship as punishment.

Maeglin had Celebrimbor’s measure though. He was a Golodh in the mold of Duilin, the kind of man who liked to believe himself an honorable one who stood outside the taint of boots on necks or lions feasting, even as he profited from the oppression he pretended he was no part of. If Celebrimbor gave his word, he would not break it. Not unless Maeglin made an enemy out of him.

So when Celebrimbor stepped out of the balcony’s shade onto the lawn, Maeglin said, “You are new-come to Gondolin, and do not know how things work here, or her laws. But people will be harmed if you speak of what you saw here today. Will you give me your word that you will keep silent?”

Celebrimbor frowned, taking another step closer, eyes searching Maeglin’s face. “I have no wish to cause harm to anyone, and do not want a word said in ignorance to bring it. Will you tell me what it is I saw here that must not pass the seal of my lips?”

Maeglin looked away, back towards the archery target. He did not like to outline the shape of Celebrimbor’s weapon against him, but Celebrimbor was right that ignorance might cause unintended harm. “This,” he swept his arm out to encompassed the target and Legolas’ abandoned bow and quiver, “weapon’s training. And the boy’s existence.”

The last lifted Celebrimbor’s brow, but he said, “You have my word. And you need not fear loose-lipped spillage. I know how to keep a secret.” 

Maeglin did not doubt that, only Celebrimbor’s willingness to do so. What were Moriquendi lives ruined to a Golodh? He would have to ensure he did not anger Celebrimbor and cause him to wield the secret he now held against Maeglin. 

With that in mind he said, not quite looking at Celebrimbor for the words left a slime over his tongue on the way out, “There is a tavern in the Greater Market that serves decent fare. Would you care to share the mid-day meal with me?” Maeglin would endure the Golodh’s company, but wanted him out of the house, away from his vulnerable people. 

The silence stretched, and Maeglin lifted his eyes to Celebrimbor’s face. Celebrimbor’s gaze had dropped to the grass, brows knit. Then it lifted and met Maeglin’s. “I would have enjoyed sharing a meal with you, Cousin, but I will decline, for I think you offer out of a sense of debt for something owed rather than any real desire for my presence.” 

Celebrimbor’s clear-eyed gaze holding his dropped Maeglin’s to the ground. Shame heated his skin. Celebrimbor was a Golodh, but Maeglin was not a man who pretended friendship when there was none in his heart. At least, he never wanted to be.

Celebrimbor said, “I will call on your house another day. Though you have said you care nothing for my friendship, I came to this city for no other purpose than to meet you and see if we might build one.” He turned and walked away, back into the house.

What? What did Celebrimbor mean he came here to meet _Maeglin_? Why would he—Why would Maeglin hold any interest for him? The only thing that made sense was that Celebrimbor was determined to have his way whatever Maeglin had to say about it. 

*

Spring quickened the earth. The fields were tilled, the sprouts of early growers already breaking their heads through the careful mounds of earth to crown them in rows of green. The orchards were ablaze in buds of red, white, pink, and yellow. And everywhere in this seeming paradise of abundance were backs bent in weeding, thin hands swinging hoes and picks, and re-digging the irrigation channels that had been silted during the spring rains. Other Wood-elves plodded behind the bent backs, carrying baskets of seeds mud-caked fingers would push into the newly-tilled fields.

Noldor walked the fields as well, one or two for every twenty Wood-elves, but the Noldor’s backs were not bowed. They walked tall and straight, their faces set in molds of distain as they looked upon the laborers. They stood with clean hands and filled bellies, wandering towards the shade trees dotting the fields’ edges as the sun reached its zenith, while the Wood-elves labored on and on and on. 

A light wind caught in Celebrimbor’s tunic where he lingered on a knoll in the land. A Wood-elf’s gaze lifted from her work to meet his. Her mouth was an unsmiling line, face inhospitable. He did not attempt to greet her with word or smile. It would have been as unwelcome as his presence. 

He turned his face away, feeling helplessness and fury drag at his soul. The sound of approaching hoof beats had him turning on his horse. A single rider with a banner of gold hair came from the west, following the road running like a vein through the valley floor.

The rider overtook him shortly, as Celebrimbor was in no hurry to reach Gondolin again. The rider pulled abreast, and Glorfindel turned a gaze cool as a mountain lake on him. “I heard rumor of your coming.”

The greeting was both perfectly polite, and disappointingly apathetic. There was no smile on Glorfindel’s mouth, no joy in his eyes as he looked at Celebrimbor. The dispassion in Glorfindel’s face was nothing like the animated child he remembered who bounced at his side as they navigated a thicket of trees, pointing out a nesting cardinal, a cluster of blue bells, a particularly interestingly shaped tree. 

Celegorm told him they had all changed. Celebrimbor couldn’t keep seeing Glorfindel as that innocent child forever. He wondered (and it was a frightening thought) if Fëanor would still recognize his sons, his grandson, if he were to walk out of the past. It was best not to think such thoughts, best not to think at all of a life before Beleriand. 

Celebrimbor had become very good at not thinking about things, so he was able to push the thoughts away and study the man riding beside him. Glorfindel had turned a glance towards the approaching white walls of the city, and as he faced Celebrimbor again the sunlight caught in the wealth of his golden hair. But Celebrimbor wasn’t looking at Glorfindel’s hair, he was suddenly, acutely aware of the angular bones of Glorfindel’s face, the height of his forehead, the full curve of an expressive mouth. He almost thought it was…but no, it was just a strange cast of the light. Though it would not be so strange if Glorfindel and Maglor shared some features, they were, after all, first cousins.

“I arrived last week,” Celebrimbor answered, though Glorfindel’s initial greeting had not really been a question. 

After a moment of silence, Glorfindel asked, “How fares Maedhros?”

This was a surprising question, since Celebrimbor had never known the two to be well acquainted. But he answered: “He is well. Busy.” A lag. Since he did not know what else to add, unused to casual inquires about his Kinslayer uncles by near-strangers, he said, “I did not know you were close.”

“We are not,” was the unhelpful reply.

Celebrimbor waited for Glorfindel to ask after Irimë, but he never did. Celebrimbor hadn’t known Irimë and Glorfindel’s relationship was so broken that Glorfindel wouldn’t even care to hear if his mother still lived or not. Celebrimbor certainly wasn’t going to talk about her if he didn’t have to, so he said nothing. 

The conversation trailed off. Celebrimbor saw Glorfindel fiddle with his reigns from the corner of his eye, as he himself shifted awkwardly in his saddle, painfully aware of the abrupt conclusion to a stilted conversation that barely got to its knees before falling flat on its face.

Alqualondë’s corpse lay between them. Celebrimbor did not think of Alqualondë. He had tucked that day so deeply into the back of his heart that most days he forgot it had even happened. When he was forced to remember, he fell into the habits of justification he’d learnt from his family: It hadn’t been their fault, if the Teleri had just held true to their promises of friendship, if they had been more than fair-weather friends, if they had but lent the boats, or even agreed to help the Noldor build their own, the Noldor had never meant to kill anyone, the Teleri were the first to use violence…

The justifications sounded much more believable falling from his father’s lips or Fëanor’s before him. Because yes, even Fëanor had had to justify their actions to his shell-shocked followers if for no other reason than to comfort those who had lost loved ones in the slaying. The deaths had to _mean_ something. The Noldor bodies they had burned alongside the Teleri had to have fallen for a reason, a just reason, because how could someone you loved –your father, your brother, your son—be murderers?

Celebrimbor and Glorfindel had shared something outside time on a rock by the sea, but now they felt little more than awkward strangers. It had all been too long ago, in another world, when they had played in a forest and Celebrimbor showed Glorfindel (who kept getting distracted by shinny stones and pretty flowers) how to trace the ore in rocks and fish nuggets of precious metals out of a stream bed.

Celebrimbor looked back at Glorfindel and found the cool, distant one’s a stranger looking back. “I had heard you were out of the city inspecting your lands.” And he didn’t stop there because he needed to probe this stranger’s heart and discover if it had decomposed like the other Noldor’s in this city. “How did you find the Wood-elves working your felids?”

Glorfindel met his eyes. The look was miles and miles away, cast down from another Planet, somewhere cut off from this one. “I am one of the good masters,” he said, voice ironed flat, picked clean of emotion like a bone of flesh. “I keep my Wood-elves fed and watered.” Before Celebrimbor could begin to pull an answer for something like _that_ from his mouth, Glorfindel spurred his horse into a canter, leaving Celebrimbor behind as he shot towards the city gates.

*

The days dripped passed, like raindrops falling from his fingertips, and with every one that splashed across the faces of white tombstone streets, Celebrimbor understood the holes in Maeglin’s heart that had been filled up with thorns a little more. And the determination to stay, to stand his ground in a city that repulsed him when the clean, wholesomeness of home called him back, solidified in his gut. 

If he could have slipped Maeglin into his pocket and run away with him out through the teeth of the valley’s prison jaws, he would have yesterday, the day before, the week before, the moment he met him. But Maeglin would not run even if Celebrimbor could pry him free from Turgon’s shackle-arms. Even if it meant freedom for Maeglin himself, he would not run. He was exactly the kind of man Celebrimbor had known him for at their first meeting. Maeglin was the body-shield standing between his people and the boot crunch. He stood not with the power of an army or a blade, but wrapped in the armor of his mother’s white body. Aredhel was the only crowbar holding the boot back from falling, for she still claimed a sliver of Turgon’s calcified heart.

Everyday Celebrimbor called on Maeglin at the House of the Wolf, and Maeglin met him in the receiving room. Celebrimbor had penetrated no deeper into the house after the day he walked into a secret. Maeglin did not turn him out, but those first few meetings after had been stunted and stiff. They still were to an extent, but as the days lengthened, so too did their conversations, until now they spent around a half-hour in each other’s company daily.

Conversation did not stray from craftmen’s talk except when they’d stumbled upon their mutual respect and admiration of the Khazâd’s halls and skill. The conversation always snapped closed like a clamshell the moment Maeglin remembered Celebrimbor was a Noldo, and not someone he was allowed to enjoy the company of. When Maeglin’s face drained of warmth, Celebrimbor took his leave. He imposed upon Maeglin enough by forcing his company on him as it was, he would not outstay what little welcome he had. 

Rumors of Celebrimbor’s pursuit of Maeglin had spread their legs and salted the city with their musk. From the way the Gondolindrim’s talked, Maeglin might be their pure princess Celebrimbor was sniffling the skirts of, so scandalized were they by his calling upon Maeglin’s house. He ignored their mouth-to-ear whisperers as he passed in the streets or strode through the palace halls, but here in the city forges they were harder to turn his shoulder against.

His jaw had picked up a tick. Even secluded as he was in a corner, their slander carried. If he told them to stop talking about Maeglin that way, they would take his words as encouragement and sink their words lower into filth. He had already been the pariah in their ranks before the rumors grew wings. Not only was he a reviled Kinslayer and Fëanorion, he was also apparently a greedy, hoarder of knowledge. 

He scoffed. Rather: they were lazy, and flaunted around titles of Master Smiths when journeymen in the Fëanorions’ forges would have made laughing stocks of their claims to mastery. It was no wonder Maeglin had so many commissions at his door even with an army of haters.

Celebrimbor reached his limit to what he would endure for a place at an anvil. He packed up his tools and work. If he heard Moriquende from their mouths _one more time_ …

He shrugged their parting barbs from his shoulders. They slid away like water off an otter’s back. They had been daggers aimed at him this time, and those he’d long since grown a tree trunk against.

It was not yet mid-day, and hours earlier than he’d taken to calling on Maeglin, but the House of the Wolf was a cool, fragrant sanctuary in a graveyard of unearthed corpses. He was received with a frown, but the woman showed him into the receiving room and left to fetch Maeglin with hope to return with a smug smile that Celebrimbor would not be received today. The Wood-elves of this house did so love getting to slam a door in a Noldo’s face. Celebrimbor did not resent them the small pleasure, though it was him being tossed out.

Maeglin agreed to see him, and, from his attire, was not fresh-come from the forge or on his way out. He only pulled his hair up in a high, loose tail like that and adorned himself with the jewelry he’d answered Celebrimbor’s inquiry with in a tight voice that his father had crafted, when he was enclosed in the safety of the house. 

He’d chosen the lapis lazuli earrings that were Celebrimbor’s favorite, not that he’d ever told Maeglin so. He kept comments like that locked behind his teeth, and not loosed where they would earn a wary, guarded look as Maeglin tried to unpick the motivation at their root. Celebrimbor had learned quickly not to complement anything about Maeglin’s person or work. He tucked his admiration for both into a space that could swallow them.

“You are here early,” Maeglin said with narrowed eyes at the pattern jarred out of loop.

“Hmm, yes,” Celebrimbor stood from the seat he’d taken as he waited to join Maeglin at the table Maeglin preferred for their conversations. It put the solid weight and distance of its black varnished top between them. He sat across from Maeglin. “I was at the city forges. It became…intolerable.” 

He wished he could ask for a place at Maeglin’s side in his forge, but if it was granted it would have been unwillingly so. When they talked craftsmen’s talk, Maeglin was careful to guard secrets of his work as closely as a Khazâd or a Fëanorion smith in the midst of a creation.

The crease pinched between Maeglin’s brows was all the answer Celebrimbor’s words would receive. This was how it always started, pulling teeth. If Celebrimbor did not enjoy Maeglin’s company as he did, he wouldn’t have been able to endure it. Back at home, he had acquaintanceships with the other smiths, but the only people he talked to as much as he now talked to Maeglin was his family.

Celebrimbor looked into Maeglin’s dark eyes for a long moment, then said, “The smiths of this city are no different from the rest of its inhabitants. They gleefully spend their time slandering your name. I could not stand enough minute of it, so I left.”

Maeglin’s gaze swung like a pendulant between Celebrimbor’s eyes, searching, digging, always thinking there was some root of malice or deception in Celebrimbor’s words when they edged too close to respect or admiration for _Maeglin_. Then he pulled back, tucking himself away behind walls he’d built for protection, and said, “They make sure to remind me I am a Moriquende every time our paths cross.” 

“Do not use that word.” Maeglin blinked into the force of Celebrimbor’s voice. “It has become the vilest of slurs, even in the lands across these mountains. Noldor use that word when they treat Wood-elves like dogs.”

“What?” Maeglin’s face paled but for two high spot of color on his cheeks, and his eyes flickered between Celebrimbor’s like he looked into the face of a ghost. “What did you say?”

All this must be known to Maeglin. Why look at Celebrimbor like that? But Celebrimbor elaborated as asked, “A Noldo who uses that word is one who does not see Wood-elves as humans anymore, but something to be used without dignity or care if their use breaks backs or hearts. There is no limit to what a Noldo who uses that word will do, because the person they are hurting is not a person in their eyes anymore.”

“You...” Maeglin’s voice was soft as leaf-fall, “your words. They reminded me…” He tore his eyes away, squeezing them closed, mouth clamping tight against some powerful emotion.

Celebrimbor’s fingers twitched against the tabletop, but dared not slide over for a questing brush against Maeglin’s hand. Maeglin’s throat constricted a few times, drawing in deep breaths, before he settled whatever had rattled inside him. He did not look back at Celebrimbor though, and his body was turned away like he wanted to flee.

Celebrimbor would not have Maeglin’s company lost so soon, and fumbled for something to say to break the tension of the moment. “The city forges are not to my taste, regardless. I do not mind a communal forge among my father’s people, for the Fëanorion smiths know how to respect privacy and let a mind work in peace. But these Gondolindrim smiths are nosy. And when I did not want to share what I was doing, accused me of stinginess. Rog even tried to shut the forge doors against me if I did not _conform_ to their ways. Well, he saw how well that worked out for him. But they act as if I should hand them over every secret of the forge I have learned through hard work or been passed down to me by my father and grandfather. As if I would hand my inheritance over like cheap bobbles.”

A gasping, wet breath tore from Maeglin’s throat, and his hands flew to his mouth to try and press it back in. His shoulders shook, eyes squeezed tight, but a tear spilled out, and then another of the desperate gasps for air. Celebrimbor sat frozen, unmoored, as the tears gathered rage and shook Maeglin’s body in earnest. 

He stood and circled the table. He pulled a chair up close to Maeglin’s and sat. He hovered a moment before his hand breached the forbidden distance and touched Maeglin’s shoulder.

Maeglin did not jerk away from him. With no rejection, his touch strengthened, spread, sliding up the curve of Maeglin’s shoulder towards his neck. Maeglin shuddered under the touch, then his body twisted and he was no longer facing away but falling into Celebrimbor’s arms. 

Celebrimbor’s eyes widened. His arms hung uncertainly, before finding a place to fold around Maeglin’s body. Maeglin’s face pressed into the cave of his neck. Celebrimbor touched Maeglin’s hair. Maeglin seemed to like that, so he did it again, stroking down, going deeper. Maeglin curled up around him, closer. Celebrimbor’s hands grew boldness in a script he was unlearned in, but his hands had always been skilled. He petted Maeglin’s back and massaged his nape until the last of the tremors shook from Maeglin’s body. Maeglin pulled away, but he did not flee from his seat at Celebrimbor’s side. 

Celebrimbor’s arms missed the shape of Maeglin inside them. He hadn’t realized how much his own body craved an embrace. The soft comfort of hugs had grown scarce in his family. Fëanor had always been the one pulling them close and pouring his love out over them. Nothing had been the same since Grandfather died.

*

It was ambitious, but that was how Celebrimbor liked his work.

He had always been drawn to objects of Power, and delighted in the creation of such pieces above any other. But they took a toll out of their creator. To infuse Power into metal and gem, the smith must be not only highly in-tuned with their own _fëa_ , but willing to temporarily sacrifice a measure of their vitality for the forging. It left the creator weakened for a time after until their reserves replenished. It was the same as casting great spells. Both drew Power from the _fëa_.

He fingered the ingot of white gold he’d selected for the necklace. He would shape it into wires, delicate as a cat’s whisker for the lacing. Gold was the most malleable metal, and for such precise work none other would do. 

He ran his thumb over the necklace’s sketch, the ink left the slightest of raised edges on the parchment where it had dried. The picture of two serpents entwined about a diamond stared eagerly back at him, ready to burst from parchment into metal. Over the head of the diamond a roof of intricate crossing vines of the thinnest gold wires would rise, as delicate and elaborate as lace.

The necklace would magically enhance the wearer’s voice. 

The idea had come to him during a tedious court banquet where he’d been forced to sit though mediocre minstrel after mediocre minstrel, practically lulled to sleep by the evening’s dullness. And he’d thought: if only he had some way of granting these straining singers his uncle Maglor’s voice that dropped notes like flower petals. The original thought was too frivolous to pursue. He did not care enough about court mistrals’ petty singing competitions to undertake a labor for their sake. 

The idea had mulled in his mind until it ran towards Battle Songs. Maglor and Finrod could battle with the magic in their lungs. If he could create an object that enhanced the Power of an Elf’s voice, then the possibilities for the uses of such an object opened up like the sea under his feet: Battle Songs, and songs to lift grieving hearts and calm ragged souls, a voice that could sway discontents, persuade the reluctant, and charm its listeners.

He flipped his sketchbook closed, and pushed it aside. The perpetrations were set. Now he needed to venture into the Great Market and purchase his supplies, but not today. Today was one of those sweltering days of high summer when the idea of bending to pick up even a wine glass was too much work to contemplate. Days like these were a rare occurrence this far North in his father’s lands, but blanketed by enchantments, Gondolin baked. 

He pulled Maeglin’s sketchbook over, not having to rise from the floor to snag it, and flipped idly though, pausing here and there to admire a sword design or a particularly exceptional helm. He rolled his head to watch Maeglin’s back bent over his desk, quill scratching away as he attended some matter of his House. 

Maeglin paused to slap a mosquito feasting on the side of his neck. “Pull out the lamps, would you?” 

Celebrimbor stared at Maeglin’s industrious form another moment before rolling to his feet with a groan. He’d monopolized a length of floor near the open terrace doors just shy of the sun’s rays, leaving the stones a cool, but hard bed against his over-heated flesh. 

He stripped off his loose cotton undershirt, letting it fall to the floor without care. “Where do you keep them?” His bare feet picked out the patches of shaded stones, darting around the sunlight snuck in. 

Unlike the receiving room, Maeglin’s study did cater to a few windows, but each one was covered in a latticework of wooden shutters. The screens’ intricate designs of stars and geometrical shapes let the sunlight bleed through just enough for Maeglin to work in the daylight hours without the aid of lamps, but not enough to irritate him. The leaking sunlight knit pretty patterns on the floor which Celebrimbor’s bare feet evaded. 

Maeglin pointed with a distracted finger at the unlit hearth. A set of lamps poked their brass necks out of wooden storage boxes. Celebeth must have brought them out a few weeks ago when summer turned, rolling up its late belly of insects and dry heat. 

Celebrimbor pulled the small crates down and took the lamps from their nests of dry grass. He flipped open the lamps’ heads, inspecting them for readiness. The caster-oil that would drive away the mosquitoes still filled the lamps’ bellies up to the halfway mark. Good enough for a day of burning. He lit only one of the lamps though. It was some hours still before sunset when the carnivorous bugs would start hunting in earnest.

He brought the lit lamp over to his cousin’s desk, not even glancing at the lengthy parchment Maeglin labored over. He may not have experienced the burden of governance personally, but he was well acquainted with its tediousness from a lifetime among men who ruled. 

He stretched out on the cool stones again, content to pass the afternoon amongst Maeglin’s sketches. His flipping fingers paused on a sketch that had nothing to do with creation and everything to do with destruction. It was as if Maeglin had had a sudden vision and grabbed the first thing lying about to hurriedly sketch out what he’d seen. It certainly wasn’t a weapon or armor design. 

It was a forest, or it had been once. A great forest that now lay burnt and hacked, charred logs and mutilated stumps the only testaments to what had once been. The earth was black. Dead. 

Celebrimbor touched a sky that raged like an ocean in a tempest, violent and red as fire. He imagined he could feel the Darkness raping the land through his fingertips, the despair, the brutal hate that had done this evil thing. It sank into his pores through the lead.

The picture was as powerful as it was desolate, and moved him to rise and approach Maeglin with the disturbed questions stirring in his mind. “What is this?” he laid the sketchbook open before Maeglin.

Maeglin flinched away from the picture that seemed to scream at the eyes, and hastily snapped the book closed. “It is nothing. I had forgotten…just a strange thought.”

Celebrimbor didn’t believe him. “That place. You knew it. You had been there before.”

Maeglin pressed the book against his chest in a protective gesture even as his face closed like a fist. “I remember ridding though it on my way to Gondolin, that is all,” he lied with a shrug, but it was a good lie. If Celebrimbor had not had Maedhros for an uncle and Curufin for a father he would not have caught it. Maeglin had woven his lie with truth, and those were always the best lies.

“It is Nan Elmoth,” Celebrimbor guessed, and from the unnatural stillness knotting Maeglin’s limbs, knew he’d guessed right.

Maeglin set the sketchbook aside with deliberate care, taking his time, buying more for himself. Finally, when his answer had been delayed beyond reason: “Yes.”

“And you drew it burning, why?”

Maeglin’s fingers arranged the quill on his desk and smoothed over the soft leather of the sketchbook’s skin. “I dreamt it.”

Celebrimbor closed his eyes, fingers gripping the desk’s edge so tightly his knuckles whitened. Foresight was a curse of Finwë’s line. He had seen his father wake screaming from dreams. If possible futures still stalked Curufin’s dreams and left him shaking, near sobs in the darkness of the night, Celebrimbor did not know. But he guessed, oh yes it was not hard to guess. His father had always been more sensitive than most of Finwë’s blood to this curse.

Celebrimbor would not pursue Maeglin’s confession. Whether Maeglin knew it for a vision of a possible future or not, confirming it would ease nothing. More than likely Nan Elmoth would burn. Whether that was its fate tomorrow or a thousand years from now, was unknown. That was why foresight was a curse; it made the seer live in fear of things that might not occur for centuries, and forever jumping at the shadows of possibilities.

“Must all that is good and beautiful in the world fade?” Maeglin whispered.

Celebrimbor pulled the leather-bound book out from under Maeglin’s fingers, flipping through the pages until he gazed on the violated forest again. He stood upon the brink of a great thought. The plunge was coming to him, pulling him under. He had but to tip his hand, roll the balls of his feet and—

The stone would be green. An emerald, but something more, something mystical…an asterisa, an opalescent star-stone. And the setting, he could see it in his mind as clearly as if he’d already pulled the shape from the Mithril, yes defiantly Mithril. The green gem, bending the light and throwing it back like stars, would ride upon an eagle’s back, for eagles symbolized protection, vision, and guardianship. The Elsesar, the Star-stone. For from his hands would come hope and healing.

“No more despair, cousin,” he gently closed the book’s cover on the blackened lands, shutting out the echo of their cries. “What night is not torn asunder by dawn’s light?” 

Maeglin’s mouth wrung with years of suffering, “And what will the light of dawn change about _this_ darkness?” he flung his arm out to encompass a city that treated him and his people like filthy rags.

Celebrimbor would pass him hope like kisses, but all he held was a rope of time tugged close, closer to its severance. He would leave for home when the leaves began to fall, and Maeglin would be stuck here, alone. But even the dawn would come to Gondolin and wash it in a raging tidal wave.

He leaned forward and cupped the back of Maeglin’s neck, holding it in a firm grip, taking Maeglin’s eyes into his. “Even this darkness will have an end. Morgoth will not be held pinned with the siege forever. He will rise up and break it one day, and on that day Gondolin must come forth. And when she does, you will ride out with her. You will be the mouthpiece of thousands, and Fingolfin will come with the fist of justice and put an end to this!” 

He breathed hard in the space between their mouths. Maeglin’s eyes were dark and wide. Celebrimbor said, softer now, “I will tell him myself and prepare the way, but it was only the confusion of the unexpected that allowed me to slip through the Hidden Way. Turgon will not let Fingolfin though. He will not surrender Gondolin without a fight, even if it means fighting his own father. Our time to act will be when Turgon draws his army out, back to the war. But the time _will_ come. And when it does you must find me. For there is so much I want to show you, so many I want to introduce you to, my friend.”

Yearning cracked through Maeglin’s face like sunlight breaking through cloud cover. He had to be strong for so many. He gave hope to his people, but held none for himself. Hands grasped his two hands, finding their lifeboat in him, and he held back the flood with the breadth of his shoulders. But he had only two shoulders and two hands. He could not save them all, though he would be dammed if he did not try.

*

The day Celebrimbor departed Gondolin he had Maeglin promise him that he would call for him in the Palantír when he needed him. “Promise me,” he said, holding Maeglin’s gaze fast with his own. Maeglin had promised, and a few threads in the tight knot of Celebrimbor’s chest loosened.

Celebrimbor turned one last look back at Gondolin, searching for Maeglin. He found him on the ramparts. Maeglin raised a hand in farewell. The wind yanked at his cloak, tossing his glossy braids like a dark banner on the white battlements. Celebrimbor gave him one last smile, his heart speared in his chest to leave him. This was a hard parting. He was needed here just as much as he was in Himlad.


	47. Wish upon a Star

Intermission: Wish upon a Star

Year 455 of the First Age, near the Iron Gates of Angband

He measured his life in a serious of departures. 

Fëanor left him first, left him a hundred times, a smirk cast over his shoulder as his silhouette faded into the horizon like the sun, leaving little Fingolfin’s hand cold and empty, while words knocked like bones around the spaces in his head: “Did you really expect me to want you dangling on my heels?” 

Next Finwë walked away, with Fëanor by his side, meaningless words of platitude dropped from lips already forgetting him, a golden crown Fingolfin never wanted cast down at his feet. Abandoned struck like a hollow cord in his chest as he picked up the unwanted mark of kingship. Anairë left him, no shock there. But she left their children too. Surprise shouldn’t have rattled him after she stepped out of the children’s lives time and again in childhood. Then Finarfin left, a look pleading to be understood before he uprooted himself from Fingolfin’s life. 

Understanding? There was none in Fingolfin’s heart. Abandonment never scarred over. It kept wounding long after the crime had been committed. No, Finarfin had no understanding from him. Finarfin abandoned his own children for an easier road.

The next time was Fëanor again. The greatest, cruelest, and yet so fitting that the circle finished with the one who started it all. The ships burned and Fingolfin wondered at his own surprise. More fool he’d been to believe the brother forever walking away would ever want to walk at his side. 

Fëanor’s abandonment was a thorn in his heel, the ache of a rotten tooth. It was splinters under tender skin, and biting flies and the scratch of nails drawing blood. It was the bow of a mouth that felt the lie of every smile. It ached, ached, ached. 

Fëanor left him (please please don’t leave me, just this once, just this once wait for me, big brother), and Fingolfin should hate him for reducing him to this, but he couldn’t. Never could.

Fëanor left him one last time, and Fingolfin could not follow no matter how fast he ran or how many years he dragged their people after him across a white nightmare (I am coming for you, Fëanor, I am coming). Fëanor left him for death, and this, _this_ abandonment Fingolfin never, ever, moved passed. Every day it sank its teeth in with a crown tight as a band around his brow, and so cold cold cold without the fire of Fëanor in the world. It haunted him from all the hollow places Fëanor’s body should have warmed, lying beside him on the bed, when he lit them both on fire.

Ah, Fëanor. You who had light enough to make heroes of us all. The sun about which all others orbited, turning faces and hearts and souls into the fire of your kiss.

There had been other abandonments after, but none challenged the ever-fresh scar Fëanor’s death sealed over his heart: Aredhel, who choose the bright fire of a Fëanorion over her father and brother waiting anxiously for word of her. Turgon’s face in the Palantír draw tight and worn like driftwood as he spoke of Aredhel’s return, a reunion that should have been joyous, blackened by the scourge of her murder. 

Irimë’s departure hurt not at all, not even a pinprick in his flesh. Once, he loved his sister, the child he remembered, all bird-bright eyes, attached at his hip, when he wasn’t running off after Fëanor. He didn’t know what went wrong inside her. Was it the years isolated with only the holier-than-thou Vanyar for company? He loved her once, but there was nothing worth loving or respecting in the woman she became.

Now, he was the one leaving the scars. He left Fingon with a burden he never meant any of his children’s shoulders to carry. Especially not Fingon. Fingon, the steady light at his side, a third arm on his body, never once wavering, never once departing. A father was not supposed to pick favorites, and in Tirion he had none, but it was impossible not to grow closer to the one child still within reach, not stolen by high, secret walls.

Fingon and Guilin, the two he loved (secretly) best. The two he now locked tightest into the yoke of rule, though the leather whip of responsibility would slide off Guilin’s shoulders, for he danced like a wild, untamable thing, never to be caged by kingship.

Fingolfin looked back only once. Barad Eithel loomed with the might of thunder over the barren, Dragon-scorched plain. His love urged him home, back to Fingon. But he had given everything he had to give. He was so cold inside, in this bleak, frozen wasteland, his sun long burnt out. 

Fingolfin urged Rochallor faster, straight for the great Iron Gates of Angband. The land still gasped and belched the Dragon-fire that had laid waste to its once fertile plain. Now, he rode passed piles of charred bones, half melted armor, and the remains of the siege line. Ash and dust blackened the air and stung his eyes.

Angrod and Aegnor, burnt alive, refusing to surrender their keeps. Turgon, who would not answer the Palantír though Fingolfin called and called and called for his son, for the armies they prepared for this day, but mostly for his son who he now believed dead, Idril, Aredhel’s little boy, and precious Glorfindel with him. The Fëanorions, Maedhros who he always wished was his own son, and all the rest of them, pieces of Fëanor, his blood, his flesh, reflections of his fire. Fingolfin had heard no word out of the East. Perhaps they too had fallen. 

He had to try to end this now or they would perish, slowly, with unnumbered tears. 

No. That was just the justification for this ride towards death. The truth was he couldn’t get the faces of all those he brought to their deaths out of his head. His lost family, but also those valiant soldiers who’d held the passes. Hithlum did not fall, but the cost…oh the cost. All those men, his soldiers and sworn-companions, who put their faith in him, who followed his every order with absolute trust, and paid for it with their lives during the long siege that went on and on and on…. 

He led them to their deaths. Not just his soldiers in Hithlum, but his nephews, his children, his grandchild, all of them, every last child. It was his decision to cross the Helcaraxë. He had not slept a night in the centuries since without awaking to the sound of cracking ice and screams. He had as good as killed those people.

The weight of thousands of bodies on his conscience smothered him. He could not breathe, could not eat, could not sleep. So many eyes looked up to him, so many hands he took in his and led wrong. He killed them all. Maybe they would struggle on a few more centuries, but death would find them all in the end.

He had never run from his duties before, not once. Not when his father cast the golden crown of a kingship Fingolfin had never wanted at his feet, not when Fëanor ran off in madness and left him to pick up the pieces and guide their people through those first terrible months of Darkness like a shepherd guided his sheep through a storm, not even when it might have been the wiser route to embrace Fëanor fully as High King of the Noldor (but the madness in his brother’s eyes made it impossible for Fingolfin to yield complete control over their people, right by blood or no). 

He did his duty by his people to the best of his ability. During the long years of peace, he deceived himself into believing he was justified in leading them over the Ice. It was this belief that sustained him, that made the name of every Elf they lost in the years of the white nightmare a shape he could read from the Scrolls of the Dead and not cripple him. 

But there was no balm for the horror that laid itself down upon him when flames engulfed the Ard-Galen. How many thousands died in this massacre? How many new names would fill the scrolls? How many did he have to etch upon his soul and bear the burden of having led to their deaths?

Duty could not sustain such a weight. He waited until the worst of the battle was over (let him give Fingon that at least), before he rode out on a mission that could be nothing but suicide. 

He wanted to die. That was all this was. 

(Forgive me, Fingon, forgive my weakness. Death awaits, but, if with my life, I can buy you even a moment’s peace, then let me go.)

The Iron Gates creaked open. A billow of black smoke escaped and crawled like winged-maggots across the scorched earth. Rochallor shrieked, smelling warg, fire, and death. But Rochallor had come with him out of Valinor, from the great herds of Oromë. Nothing as simple as scent would defeat him.

When Fingolfin saw the trio of light blazing brighter than any star in the Black One’s crown, he shouted a challenge. It rang off the towering peaks of Thangorodrim. He charged the monster that stole Fëanor from him, and so many of his people’s lives and joy, and now dared to flaunt pieces of Fëanor before him, so close but oh so far.

When Thorondor snatched up Fingolfin’s broken body, Rochallor ran after and neighed his challenge at the Eagle that stole the burden rightfully his. The Eagle carried Fingolfin’s body far far away from home and Fingon awaiting Fingolfin’s fate with dread in his heart. When the gates of Barad Eithel opened for Rochallor, his coat was stained with his friend’s blood and he wept for the death of a star.

*

Coward. Turgon slunk away on the crutch of the Palantír to tell Fingon their father was dead. Then snapped the connection rather than face Fingon’s questions. Father might not be dead if Turgon hadn’t cowered in his _precious_ city.

But Fingon had known his father for dead when foreboding woke him in the deep watches of the night. He hurried to the balcony, and fisted the railing as he scanned the blackened plain below. Fingolfin was a white dot on Rochallor, shooting like a star towards the Black Gates. He knew, in the deep chambers of his heart, he would never see his father again.

Father was a young warrior’s security with his mentor at his back, knowing, even if he stumbled, there would always be a stronger, wiser sword to hold the enemy back, and a firm hand to pull him up. Father was bravery, nobility, and standing tall. Father was home, love like sunshine, and the heat at his side; it soaked into his skin and loosened all the hard knots within. Father was that moment the stern reserve Fingolfin wore like a mask for their people peeled away to reveal all the jewel-bright passion beneath. 

Fingon reached out to brush Fath—his crown. It rested on the desk, removed the moment the weight of his people’s eyes lifted. The gold was cold under his fingertips, and heavy with the weight of liability, and death –the death of the life he knew. He wouldn’t call that life carefree, not since Tirion, but Barad Eithel was a world away from Tirion. He never wanted to be king. He could barely manage a prince. 

It wasn’t the role cast of leader he feared. He could honestly say he made a good leader, and did not fear the responsibility of his men’s lives on a battlefield. Kingship was not a battlefield, though.

At least this crown would never cut into the flesh of Guilin’s brow. For this small mercy Fingon gave thanks. He sent his prayers to no one and nowhere, for he had no more gods than his father had taken. No Valar worship for this son of Fingolfin. No Eru either. Until Fingon saw proof the creator of the world had not abandoned his creation, any prayers would just be hot air shot up to a deaf heaven. 

Fingon believed in what his two eyes could testify to. He believed in valor and the love of a brother-in-arms to have his back. He believed in acting only as his conscience dictated. He believed in history, that a man’s history was what made him, his choices. Not his hopes, his dreams, his fantasies of a thousand what ifs; only his history. They all made choices and all had to live with them, for good or ill, for happiness or despair. 

Fingon made some poor choices in his past, but he looked into their eye and embraced them. He found the beauty that could rise out of missteps: Guilin. He made some noble choices in his life, and never regretted a moment of them: risking his life for Maedhros and bringing his best friend, his beloved, his brother, home.

Maedhros. Fingon’s hand curled into a ball, belly sickening. No. Maedhros was out there somewhere, fighting, maybe hold-up in Himring, pinned in by a siege, or maybe the Fëanorions’ defense had broken and they were pushed back, but wherever Maedhros was, he was still fighting. He was not dead. Fingon would have known the moment his bonded’s _fëa_ unspooled from its _hröa_. But the fear that gnawed at him in the dark was this: Maedhros recaptured. But he was not. He was _not._ Maedhros was out there fighting and _free_.

He drew a shaky breath. He would continue to believe that. He had to. 

Over a year ago communications cut off from the East. The Palantír darkened when its eye cast further east than besieged Tol Sirion. Nargothrond’s Palantír still answered his, but it was the only one. That did not mean the East had fallen. It did not.

He took comfort from the face of his son he saw just this morning in the Palantír. Guilin was safe in Nargothrond. Guilin’s face had been tight with grief, but it had been alive.

If his son had cried for Fingolfin, than it was only to the quite dark. Fingon knew he had, knew Guilin had loved his grandfather as a third son, perhaps a second for Fingon did not know if Turgon shed a tear for their father. No, that was uncharitable. But Fingon couldn’t help blaming Turgon for their father’s death. Why hadn’t he come when they needed him most? Wasn’t that the point of the Hidden City? To be a surprise attack falling upon Morgoth like a blade out of the shadows? 

Turgon couldn’t pin the fault of his absence on a darkened Palantíri either –for one, the Palantír’s darkness should have alarmed him enough to at least _investigate_ ; it had been over a year since fire roared out of Angband and burnt the Ard-Galen black—but Turgon had other means of gathering news of what passed in the world outside his hidden realm. There could be no excuse.

Fingon’s fist uncurled, and he took the crown into his hands, framing it between his palms. So many beloved heads had worn this before him, and now it passed to him, a cup full of history and responsibility. 

Less than a month had passed since his father’s death (and with it the fighting trickled down like the slow drip of molasses until now Tol Sirion was the only major Western front), but Fingon already felt the distance between the King and his people yawning vast as an ocean. Had it been like this for his father? Fingon thought of the way his father shed the gold crown when he entered his private rooms, like a snake shedding its skin, a mask peeled off and tossed aside. _That is how you conquer this, son, that is how you win,_ he heard his father’s voice like a whisper of mountain bones in his ear. 

So that was how he would do this. That was how he would beat this and still remain Fingon. He would learn, as his father had, how to be two people: King and Fingon. 

Fingon threw open doors that had become blockaded with stress from only a month, and spread his arms to embrace the legacy of his father: his kingship. He would conquer this like he conquered Thangorodrim for Maedhros. 

He had accomplished many mighty feats in battle and deeds worthy of song, but being a king, this was something else, something heavier. The weight of an entire people rode on his shoulders now, and he could not fail them. 

The crown’s golden jewel flashed, gathering light and throwing it back, or maybe drawing from some inner light; the jewel was temperamental. Fingon pressed his thumb over the gem and it pulsed warm and bright, as if in approval of him. Trust Fëanor to craft a crown capable of approving or disapproving of its wearer.   
Fingon’s breath came out in a puff of laughter. He lifted the crown and rested it upon his brow. It sat with new lightness –not weightless, it could never be that—but it no longer felt like logs pressed down into his temples, crushing him under this weight of responsibility.

A knock turned his head to the door. “My king,” Gailron’s voice called. He was one his father’s sworn-companions who’d pledged himself to Fingon after Fingolfin’s death. Fingon had known Gailron, second son of the lord of the House of the Lion, since they’d been youths together in Valinor. Neither of them resembled the immature, blithe young men they’d been back then. “A company of riders approach. They come from the East, across the Ard-Galen.”

Fingon grabbed his sword (always in easy reach), and crossed to the door, strides long and powerful, only a dash of that careless, loping walk remaining. He pulled the door open to meet Gailron on its other side. “What banners do they carry? The Enemy’s?” 

Morgoth should know by this point the Noldor would never treat with him. If he thought to find a weak king sitting upon the High Throne in Fingolfin’s absence, he thought wrong.

Gailron hesitated, shooting a glance back over his shoulder, but they were indeed alone. Assured the corridor was clear, Gailron met his king’s eyes again, his own going soft and knowing. “No, they fly the star of Fëanor. And our signalers further down the cliffs have raised the White Star, my king. For Lord Maedhros.”

Fingon’s hand came up to grip the underside of Gailron’s forearm, Gailron’s hand finding its way to Fingon’s bicep, as if to hold Fingon up. “It is…is it certain?”

“They could have mistaken Lord Amras or Amrod for Maedhros, I cannot say how close the riders have drawn, and the plain swirls black with dust, the visibility atrocious, as you know, my king. But a Fëanorion comes with news, at the least.”

Fingon closed his eyes, taking in a deep breath. News, at the least, news of Maedhros’ continued freedom (because Maedhros wasn’t captured. Not Maedhros). “Have the captains alerted. Until we know with certainty this is not a ploy of Morgoth’s—”

“They have been, and the soldiers stand position at the walls. The signals have been raised to put all the garrisons in the mountains on alert as well.” Gailron’s mouth twitched.

Fingon snorted. “It is well I have a competent army.”

“Very competent, my king,” Gailron’s eyes danced. 

“Well, since it seems Barad Eithel is not in need of a king, I will just go primp myself for a proper diplomatic reception, shall I?” His eyes laughed back, heart high and soaring. Maedhros was coming to him, he knew it, knew it in his bones.

“Be sure to pretty your hair, and leave it only half braided I should think. Lord Maedhros likes your hair down.”

Fingon shot Gailron a teasingly scandalized look. “And just how do you know how the king’s husband prefers him?”

“Oh, we sworn-companions hear things, my lord.”

Well, Gailron hadn’t heard much of anything as there hadn’t been much of anything since Angband. Fingon shoved the longing away. There was Maedhros falling asleep in his arms (still wrapped up in his clothing, unable to let their bodies press skin to skin); there was Fingon’s lips gently brushing his beloved’s neck (Is this all right, Maedhros? Tell me if it is too much.); there was Maedhros’ hand in his, their fingers twining together as they bodies no longer could; there was Maedhros and that was what meant everything in the end.

Fingon only spared a few moments to pull on a midnight-blue cloak trimmed in silver fox-fur, strap his sword to his waist, and slip a few rings and a brooch on to complete the face of the Noldor’s High King. His hair he left in braids threaded with gold ribbons, despite Gailron’s teasing. He settled his hand on the pommel of his sword, head tilted back, the light sliding off the polished metal of the crown like glass, and cut a stride through the halls of Barad Eithel that caught eyes and had them clinging as their king swept past. 

As he descended the Long Stair that dropped them from the eagle’s nest of the inner-keep to the outer-courtyard below where he would meet the coming riders, Fuilmë came hurrying up the stairs to meet him. 

“My king!” She stopped before him, cheeks high with color, and breath puffing out in a curl of white as it hit the freezing air of a Northern winter. “I come from the gate. The rider’s identity has been confirmed. It is Lord Maedhros. He comes up the pass now. He will reach the gate in less than a half-hour.”

Fingon’s eyes turned, searching, yearning, down to the pass winding narrow and cutting through the shoulders of the encroaching cliffs. But the many corners of the pass kept Maedhros from his eyes.

“How many ride with him, sweetling?” Gailron spoke from behind Fingon, where he stood with Fingon’s other sworn-companions at their king’s shoulders.

Fuilmë’s eyes turned to her father, “Not more than a dozen, Father. I have already sent word up to the keep to have rooms prepared. With your leave, my king,” her head dipped to Fingon.

Fingon waved the concern for stepped-toes away. Fingolfin had built Barad Eithel and set in place the infrastructure and initiative in the minds and hands of its people to ensure she could endure even if her high lords had all been slain. 

Fuilmë, as the daughter of a lord and one of the ladies of the court closest to the king on account of her father’s place in Fingon’s sworn-guard, was more than welcome in Fingon’s eyes to presume upon Fingon’s approval of her judgment. Had she been a vain or viciously ambitious woman only concerned with social position, things would have stood differently between them. 

Fuilmë was one of those trusted few privileged with the secret of where her king’s heart lay, for she had grown into a woman he respected. When she’d been a young woman, hovering close to womanhood, she’d fancied herself in love with the handsome, charming Prince Fingon. Fingon could hardly fail to notice with the way she blushed and stuttered in his presence. She’d even written him a love note full of declarations of eternal love she’d slipped to him with burning cheeks and soulful, doe-eyes.

They both laughed over it now, but at the time it had been painfully awkward. She’d grown out of the infatuations of youth and into a woman with a quality of character Fingon could call friend.

“A company of only a dozen across the Ard-Galen!” Gailron voiced Fingon’s own heart. 

It was so very like Maedhros to ride through Enemy occupied lands with only a handful of swords. Dammed be any servant of the Enemy who got in his way, he wouldn’t waste time riding around on safe paths. Anything that crossed his path –Orcs, Warg pack, _Balrog_ — could have been pitied if they were anything but servants of the Enemy.

“Come, we will meet them at the gates.” Fingon would give Maedhros a piece of his mind over his recklessness later, now his beloved awaited him.

When Maedhros led his riders through the opened gate, hair streaming out behind him like the tail of a comet, and armor flashing in the pale winter sunlight, Fingon forced his feet to stay rooted to the earth and not take him flying into his beloved’s arms in the middle of the crowded courtyard. But his blinding smile, strong voice calling out a greeting, and arm reaching up to clasps with Maedhros’ were nothing but the skin slipped over the heart in his chest reaching out to its home. Inside the silver of Maedhros’ eyes Fingon unfurled himself like a banner, revealing the wholeness of his being, his unshaken love and all those promises whispered to each other over the years. Maedhros’ eyes, cradling him back as their arms could not do before so many other eyes, said the words his mouth could not: you are mine and I am yours.

They endured the necessary steps they must cross before they could be alone together. Fingon offered a formal greeting, welcoming his cousin as an ally, the High-lord of the East, and the valued commander of the Noldor’s Eastern armies. Every step in the dance of greeting, and the physical ones they had to climb up to the keep and the privacy of Fingon’s rooms, was only made bearable by Maedhros’ shoulder resting just close enough to his he could brush against it, their hands touching under the cover of their cloaks, and the eyes he met and met again, each touch of eye-to-eye speaking a thousand words with a sweep of lash, a crook of brow, a look that clung and did not let go.

Finally, finally, the door of his rooms shut behind them, and he had his husband in his arms. Maedhros held him back, letting Fingon’s head rest against his shoulder, and laying his hand on Fingon’s back, a delicate touch, nothing fluttering towards passion.

“I feared…” Fingon couldn’t voice the terrible fear that kept him awake in the long hours of the night.

“Not while you breathe.” Maedhros’ hand picked out one of Fingon’s braids, measuring its weight between his fingers. 

Fingon squeezed him tighter, hands burying themselves in Maedhros’ hair. He felt Maedhros stiffen under him, but it had been so long, and he’d been so afraid and alone, he couldn’t let go. He couldn’t.

Maedhros’ fingers brushed against the gold crown. “A rumor reached us. I had to know if it was true. Fingolfin is…has passed?”

Fingon shuddered, pressing closer into Maedhros’ long body. “Yes.”

Maedhros did not speak, but it said everything that he closed his arms around Fingon with a tightness Fingon hadn’t known since Maedhros stopped holding him after Angband. 

They stood like that, wrapped together, heart pressed to heart, for a long moment. Into the skin of Maedhros’ neck, Fingon said, “We had no news. Months and months and nothing. The Palantír would show us nothing of the East. Father…Father thought all of you dead.” Or as good as.

Maedhros sighed, hand running down the length of Fingon’s back to settle on Fingon’s waist and slowly draw their bodies apart. The face he met Fingon’s with had shadows of weariness inside its bones. “The Palantíri would not bend to our will when we turned them too far West either. I could not see…” His mouth pressed tight against the escape of imagined horrors. 

Fingon’s hands enfolded the tips of Maedhros’ shoulders, cradling them. Maedhros found the strength to press on, his voice slipping into that aloof coolness he sliced opponent’s arguments to pieces with razor-sharp logic and the brutal bluntness he would wield in the faces of those who wished to live in a fantasy world where the war, and only the war, was not the Noldor’s first and forever priority. But Fingon’s ribs did not press tight against his heart to hear that tone of voice aimed at him. Maedhros also used it when he bled inside, when his chest stuffed too full and he picked up all the self-control he’d learned as a prince of the Noldor in Tirion. 

In Tirion Maedhros had wore masks when he played his role to the people and court, but they had been masks he’d shaped and felt comfortable inside, enjoying the thrill of a game well-played, a word well-turned, another lord’s step he had to rise to the challenge to meet with his own ingenuity. Maedhros had learned another kind of mask in Angband. A cold one that stripped his voice to its bones, cut like knives, and would not shatter until _Maedhros_ chose to take it off. 

“Morgoth out-maneuvered us. We grew over-confident, and reliant on the cleverness of our plans, the strength of our fortresses, and the skill of our armies. We may have just lost the war because of it. Time will tell if we are not indeed already walking dead. We will take stock of what we have left, shore up our fortifications again, and assess what is left of us.” Maedhros said this with ruthless honesty. Yes, they might have lost the war in one fell swoop, but no one on Fingon’s council, not one of his captains, not even the least footsoldier, had voiced that secret fear.

“As for the collapse of our line of communications,” Maedhros was not done, “I have theorized, and my brothers stand in agreement, that Morgoth has engineered a method of imposing a line of interference upon the Palantíri’s reach. A work of Black Magic, but not beyond the power of a Vala. We should have anticipated and put contingency plans into place for exactly such a strike. Crippling our communications, isolated the pockets of resistance, was a cunning and deadly move on Morgoth’s part.”

“We cannot think of every potential attack the Enemy may employ. It is impossible. Who would have thought the Palantíri assailable?”

“I should have.”

“You cannot preempt Morgoth’s every move.”

“If I do not stay two steps ahead, we will end two steps behind and on our knees in a field of dead bodies.” Maedhros broke away from Fingon’s touch. His mouth set in a grim line, and he walked to the side table Fingon had left piled with work beside a chair, putting distance between them.

Maedhros’ hand went to the clasp of his cloak and pulled it off, throwing the dark fabric over the chair’s back. “I have three days I can spare before I must ride back to Himring.” His fingers worked on the clasps of his armor, but were only able to strip his arm guards off without assistance.

Fingon took in a deep breath. Three days. That was…nothing, but everything, for it was three days with Maedhros he would not have otherwise.

How long had it been since they spent more than a week in each other’s company? And how many months slipped passed between those brief visits? It didn’t matter how often they’d spoken in the Palantír in the years between Angband and this moment, it could not make up for the other’s absent presence.

Fingon looked back at all those years he’d wasted for them in Tirion, and wanted nothing so much as to pry back every grain of sand slipping through the hourglass. All those hours and hours, precious days and years they spent walking circles around each other, one pair of blind eyes away from touching.

Now there was only this, these stolen moments Fingon spent watching the sun gasp out in the west, last light reaching, reaching, reaching to grasp the moon, too not let this day too slip passed. Every year, every stolen moment together, was one more lost in which their mouths had not held each other’s, in which this enemy of time gorged itself fat upon the hours it siphoned down its gullet, gone, gone, gone, and Fingon left standing on the battlements one more time, or being the one riding out of Himring with one last glance back as his heart pounded stay, stay, stay, to himself, to Maedhros’ back leaving him. 

But they couldn’t stay. A war stood between them, duties tore them apart, all these things Fingon had swore would not keep him from Maedhros’ side when even a Dark God had not, now did.

Maedhros was able to unbuckle his sword, and rested it across the arms of the chair. Fingon pulled off his own cloak, drawing the crown from his brow, as he crossed to help his husband with the rest of his armor. Maedhros did not speak as Fingon peeled it off, directing Maedhros with soft words; he kept his face blank and eyes fixed straight ahead.

Fingon settled the last of the armor against the wall, and turned back to look at his beloved. Maedhros’ presence was almost too captivating to pay attention to the little details, gaze too compelling to notice the tired lines about those eyes at first. But Fingon was no casual observer. He looked over the grey wool tunic Maedhros had pulled over a black undershirt and black leggings, no touch of adornment or even elegant embroidery to add beauty.

Maedhros’ clothing had gone from muted directly after Angband, to downright dreary. Heavy, like a barrier between him and the world. Fingon did not like what it bespoke of Maedhros’ mental state.

He came to stand beside Maedhros, and put a cautious hand on his arm, unsure of the touch’s welcome after Maedhros had removed himself from Fingon’s arms. “How have you fared?”

There was an infinitesimal stiffening in the muscle he held. He would not have noticed the tension if he’d not been touching Maedhros. “Well enough,” Maedhros brushed the concern away, and tried to distract Fingon with: “Nargothrond’s Palantír has not been cloaked, and Curufin and Celegorm were able to tell us they reached that safe haven. All my brothers are accounted for, and Himring held, though Maglor and Caranthir’s fortresses fell as well as Himlad. We took heavy losses.”

That wasn’t what Fingon had meant and Maedhros knew it. “You look tired. Are you sleeping enough?” Then, softly, as if asking this quietly would make it easier to tread the dangerous ground: “Are the nightmares worse?”

Maedhros would not answer for a long moment, and Fingon feared his beloved would not touch the shadow of Angband peaking out of the corners of his face. They danced around Angband, had for years, only swinging close to brush that terrible wound that ran like a ropy scar through Maedhros’ soul, the scar tissue refusing to heal, refusing to yield enough for Fingon to slip his way in.

But then Maedhros said, face so blank it frightened Fingon, and voice harsh as if daring Fingon to judge him: “The nightmares have not eased. But silence is the real danger, the still places when the memories pounce. But if I just keep fighting, keep moving, far enough to—” To what, Maedhros did not say, leaving the thought unfinished.

Into the silence following that rushed confession, Fingon thought, not for the first time, that Maedhros’ tenacity was a stubbornness bordering on self-destruction.

Fingon’s fingers crawled cautiously over Maedhros’ shoulders, needing to hold onto him, to reassure himself of Maedhros’ substance. But the body he pressed against felt as dark as a memory, as empty as a cage. The terrible impression was fleeting, and completely shattered when Maedhros leaned back into his side, letting out a sigh that seemed to shake his whole skeleton.

He curved around Maedhros’ body, bringing them face-to-face. He wanted to make love with Maedhros, love him and love him until all his love was enough to wash away the past and walk anew into the daybreak of tomorrow, the past no longer a claw about Maedhros’ mind, heart, and soul.

He asked (he always asked first, always hoping, always swept up in joy when Maedhros said yes), “Can I kiss you?”

Maedhros did not answer for a long moment. But finally, like the quiet sigh of a breeze, “Yes.”

With steady, if cautious hands, Fingon cupped his husband’s jaw, drinking in the beauty that was almost too inhumanly sharp and bright to bear. He kissed Maedhros. Soft, like a brush of breath upon parted lips. 

Maedhros started shaking under his touch, but Fingon did not let him fall apart. He pressed on, keeping his mouth light, nothing forceful, no touch too much like a restraint. Then Maedhros kissed him back and there was nothing gentle about it. It was the kiss of a starving man. Maedhros’ hand was in his hair, running over his face, his body, as if he couldn’t touch him enough. Fingon responded, all thoughts of wariness forgotten. He pressed himself into Maedhros, grabbing a handful of that copper mane, dropping kisses into the long column of Maedhros’ neck—

“No!” Maedhros shoved him, stumbling in his haste to get away. The word acted like a slap of fire across Fingon’s skin and brought him painfully back to his senses.

“Shh, it is me, it is just me. It is your Fingon.” He held up his hands, palm-up as he used to do when he tried to calm Maedhros in the wake of one of his fits directly after Thangorodrim. 

Maedhros was not so far gone this time; there was no wild violence in his eyes. He pressed his face into his hand, breathing deeply. “Forgive me, I—”

“There is nothing to forgive. It was I who got carried away.” Fingon took a slow step towards the trembling form as if approaching a skittish animal.

Maedhros shook his head, hand dropping away from his face to reveal a weariness soul-deep. The eyes that looked at Fingon were only half-focused, seeing something, somewhere, else. Fingon did not think he could hate Morgoth anymore than he already did. 

He remembered eyes like the silver of Telperion’s light that used to crinkle at the edges with smiles and dance as they teased him. He swore he would see those eyes again. He would see Maedhros look at him and _see_ him with nothing else in the way. Someway, somehow, he would slay all those shadows lurking like poison in Maedhros’ eyes.

He touched Maedhros’ cheek, bringing him back to him for the moment. 

“I cannot do this. I want, more than anything, but I cannot.” Maedhros’ voice was so defeated Fingon wanted to tear the ones who’d done this to his proud, beautiful beloved apart, then stitch them back together so he could kill them again.

He leaned forward and placed a tender kiss on Maedhros’ mouth, and whispered into the shadow of the kiss: “You can do this if we do it together. You can have this, Maedhros. I swear to you I will make it so.” 

Maedhros pressed their foreheads together, a silent promise to try. He was Maedhros Fëanorion, and he would not let Morgoth take this from him too.

“I will be here to help you, whenever you are ready. I won’t leave you. Never,” Fingon promised.

The smile Maedhros sent him was a sad thing full of the intimate knowledge of grief and loss. Fingon couldn’t promise that and they both knew it. They had only this moment, and every one they were granted after would be treasured like the blessing it was. 

Fingon led Maedhros to his bed and they laid down side-by-side, tangled about each other like a two vines that had grown up from seed together and now were so closely entwined any attempt to separate them would destroy them both. They lay like that all night, not needing more, not pressing for something they might never be able to achieve in the aftermath of Angband. But sometimes, just holding onto someone while being held can be just as satisfying as sex. It was enough. Fingon held his husband in the cradle of his arms, hand cupped over the place he had buried his heart in Maedhros’ chest. Maedhros held him back, Fingon falling into his skin and feeling its thinness, just a barrier between him and the soul that cradled him back like the earth cradled a tree within the fierce cross of its arms.


	48. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, I

Intermission- Rage, rage against the dying of the light, I

There was no moment in which he knew he had awoken, for there had been no sleep, only the drift. The drift could have lasted the span of a breath or the expanse of an Age. But drift was not the right word. It did not scratch the surface of what transpired between the moment of his death and this.

He’d been pulled to a place built with what he’d once know as stone, but now looked upon with new eyes and understood with the intimacy of its creator. 

He moved through the air and down against the compounds of millions of pieces fit together with a complexity and precise balancing of eye that delighted a soul moved to creation. Beauty had grown under his hands once, but no, that was his brother, not him. He had grown beauty with his tongue, with clever words and a leaping mind. But no, he had grown beauty with his hands once too, and been delighted by it. Things not so different from the shapes of molecules strung together and called stone had once taken shape under his hands. And now a new world had been laid out before him like a feast.

If only he were not so very weary.

He spread himself down over the stone, rubbing up against calcium and carbon. Wide, he spread himself, pooling like water, like arms opened. A corner of himself touched heat, and he turned into it, wondering, exploring. 

Once, long ago, he read the words penned from a hand he would have washed in ichor and kissed the five tips of. That hand spoke with gestures as a mouth he would have sunk himself into spoke with the passion of fire. The hand had written of light as if it were something tangible enough to capture in a cupped palm, an opened mouth, and drunk. That hand had grown up to capture light.

The photons danced together in rivers of color as they poured themselves down in waves upon the stones. He sunk himself into heat, into light. He found the spark of the divine inside its touch, and followed it up into a sky where the bloom of Laurelin rode, then backward through time to the branch of a tree spun from carbon dioxide and the breath of Eru that was the mother of all light. 

A creature smelling of the world’s blossoms, said this Tree of Light was hers. But the Tree of Light was crowned with divinity not of her making. This creature calling itself goddess and growing pride like her gardens under praise not belonging to her, was but the seed of a thought, as all her kin were. 

But this Light, this Light undimmed and never dying, the seeds of thought had carried down from the firmament as a Flame Imperishable. It was the breath of god breathed out into their cupped hands when innocence still lit their faces with glory. The breath of god, the spark of the divine, had been entrusted unto them, but they forgot this Light they gloried in above all the workings of the Song was not of their making. 

They forgot the Light was not theirs to give or theirs to begrudge. They hid the breath of god from the children of god under ransom. The price they claimed for what had been given freely unto them was the children’s lives lived out under their watch, inside the palms of their hands. 

They forgot the Light unquenchable was not theirs to mourn as the work of their hands when the Darkness swallowed it. They forgot the Light preserved with foresight into three jewels was not theirs to demand. The Light of the Silmarils was the sparks of _fëa_ the jewels’ creator had sacrificed for the jewels making, and the breath of god.

There was no door between the walls of stones arching up and up and up to meet in a single point coming together to stab the sky like a spear. Only high windows filtered in the light. He thought to explore the glass roof of this tower, and the thought brought him his wish. There was no distance, no height or depth left that held any boundary to a soul. Only the spells woven through the cores of the stones and threaded through the planes of glass bound him.

He pressed up against the glass, hungry for the world denied him. He knew –as he had touched the light and known the touch of the Flame Imperishable like a forgotten but ancient friend—that halls of grey stone were not what should have awaited him. There should have been the secrets of deep forests to explore, the heart of a nebula to sail, a sea he walked the bottom of or skimmed its tossing breast on and on and on while a wind blown down from the stars took him in its mouth and whispered with the echo of the Song.

There should have been no cold. There would have been no cold among the stars, even in the vast darkness between them, no cold in the deeps of the sea, or the threads of clouds above, but there was cold here. It wrapped itself around him, swallowing him whole like the star-wind would have swallowed him, only nothing like.

He looked out, yearning, upon a world stolen from him. Stars reigned, drawn so close he could have caught them on his fingertips. The heads of white-capped mountains jutted just out of reach, with the moon hung above their teeth. If he’d had a hand, he could have cupped the white orb in his palm. A glimmer of green ribbon was the plains of Valinor, as distant as the depths of an ocean from the ship skimming its chest. He drank in the world as if it was his first time, for it was –the first time he’d seen it with the eyes of a _fëa_.

Though this room, this expanse of building blocks the core of the world was build upon, had no entrance and no escape, a figure appeared before him, re-spinning itself from the air and into a body of carbon, water, and the seed of a god’s thought.

This thought made substance, clothed itself in the body of an Elf and a shroud of gray. A name shaped his lips: Námo.

Námo spoke, voice soft as shadows and carrying no light. No anything. “The judgment of Fingolfin Finwëion is at hand. Let the scales be brought out.”

Judgment, yes, the air hung heavy with the taste of it. The abstract thought flowed out from the Vala’s woven skin, seeping from the core of his essence. The balance of the world. Scales weighed, crimes measured, repayment taken until the scales pulled level again or the one who upset the balance was sucked utterly dry. Judgment was not a word the cousin of mercy.

The naked soul stirred from its union with the light. Fingolfin, the Judge had named him, yes, so his name had been. He rose, drifting, moving without need for conscious thought, only purpose, to face the Judge. 

The trial of Fingolfin son of Finwë began. With a voice flat as a sheet of hammered steel, Námo listed the names of the Teleri Fingolfin had killed at Alqualondë. Each name formed into a grey tear dropping into the cupped palm of the judgment scale. It tipped ever lower, the weight of the dead piling up. Námo did not stop with those Fingolfin’s hand slew, but accounted the Teleri who’d died at the hands of his people who followed him, as crimes he bore an equal guilt in. 

Fingolfin did not deny his guilt. But he would not have undone his actions if given a second chance. He had not fought for ships. He had fought to Fingon’s side, to Aredhel’s defense. He had fought with terror in his heart when Teleri arrows rained death on Fëanor’s shield. He would have charged into that slaughter even if his children’s lives had not been in danger.

Námo did not stop with the Kinslaying, the charges against Fingolfin carried into the Elves slain by cold, shifting ice, despair, and grief upon the Helcaraxë. Fingolfin pulled himself tight, winding like a ball of yarn into himself. 

The flame of his spirit dampened, but the listing of names he had never forgotten by the self-righteous lips of a Vala, did not throw shame like rocks upon him. It was not for the Valar to judge him or forgive him. Only the Elves his actions had led into death had that power. He wrapped himself up because that was what he did. He had no face to drop a mask over, only a burning to subdue and a soul to gather close, not for the Vala’s eyes.

The list of dead laid at his feet spilled into the Glorious Battle, and then the battle of the Dragon-fire he had died in. Each name plop, plop, plopped into the heavy lake of tears his judgment scale groaned under.

The Valar had no right to be his judges, but they had appointed themselves as such, and would be his jailers. He would never escape these cold halls. They would seal him up in a deep pit of stone, and he would never again see the gold of Fingon’s heart, the laughing smirk on Guilin’s mouth, the blue expanse of Glorfindel’s eyes creeping up little by little towards the sky, the sorrow worn on Turgon’s mouth, or know if Maedhros ever learned to laugh again. 

The last name fell like a stone from Námo’s lips and plopped into the lake. Fingolfin pulled himself tight, tight, tight. It was coming now, his sentence.

Námo folded his hands before him, grey cloak hanging off his shoulders like a funeral shroud. “An accounting of the crimes of Fingolfin Finwëion has been made.” He paused. Silence stretched, pulling at Fingolfin, threatening to tear him apart. He held himself tighter, tighter, tighter. 

Námo stirred, like a dog shaking off a pesky flee. His hand rose over the momentous lake of tears. His fingers closed into a point like an old crone’s, sharp and bird-like, and the multitude of tears spiraled up, disappearing into the pinch of his fingertips. The scales hung empty, as if weighing the crimes of a newborn babe. 

Námo tucked his hands into the folds of his grey shroud. “The scales are balanced. Justice has been taken.”

Fingolfin’s control threatened to slip; a blast of hope like wind off a firestorm rocked him. Could he…could he be reborn? He could go back. He could do this over again, and not fail them this time. He wouldn’t leave them again, he promised. (Oh Fingon, I am so sorry. I abandoned you. I _abandoned_ you. I despaired. I threw my life away and left you all alone. Forgive me, forgive me!)

“The scales are balanced. The debt paid,” Námo spoke into the fire-storm of Fingolfin’s hope, sowing confusion. How had the debt been paid? 

He remembered the words of the Doom: tears unnumbered ye shall shed. Had the lake of his crimes been balanced by his suffering? But that seemed a compassion beyond the ken of the Valar.

/How has the debt been paid?/ 

“The dept was paid,” Námo spoke in his flat voice, answering nothing.

/If by the measure of your scales, I am free of punishment, then I shall leave these halls./

“You reside in the Halls of the Dead, for you possess no _hröa_ , and none shall be fashion for you.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to throw back words of defiance: I shall fashion my own! But those were words suited to Fëanor. Fingolfin walked softly. He held himself wound tight. He could not blaze and rage; he was a prisoner in the halls of a Power. /You say I shall not be aided in the fashioning of a new _hröa_ , but I ask of you why this is, if by your own scales I am judged and found not guilty of any crime?/

“The scales were balanced. But Fingolfin Finwëion’s crimes were great. You shall not be reborn.”

/Great through my crimes were, they have been paid. By the Valar’s own laws, a man cannot be punished for a crime after the punishment has been met./

“An Exile shall not be released from my halls until the decree of Manwë Súlimo is met. The Halls of the Dead fall under the jurisdiction of the Lord of Arda who speaks with the voice of the All Father. Manwë Súlimo’s word is the final, highest law.” 

“Hear the decree of the Lord of Arda: the Exiles, and the children of the Exiles to the furthest degree, will reside in the Halls of Mandos until such a time as they repent utterly of their sins, and all those their deeds brought death upon intercede on their behalf, or Arda Marred is remade. And this further decree falls upon Fingolfin Finwëion: the Exiles, be they Kinsalyers, shall be held in a place appointed to those who shed the blood of Kin. And there they shall remain. Let them be advised to use this time to the advancement of their souls, in mediation upon their crimes, and repentance from their pride and hubris which the Valar perceive as the greatest agents of the Noldor’s downfall.”

“Fingolfin Finwëion, slayer of Kin, shall reside in the Halls of Mandos until such a time as he repents utterly of his sins, and all those his deeds brought death upon intercede on his behalf, or Arda Marred is remade. Here ends the judgment of Fingolfin Finwëion. Let justice be carried out.”

Fingolfin did not get down on his knees and beg for clemency as two Maiar in Námo’s service stepped from the shadows, emerging like grey-cloaked ghosts, to take him away. The firestorm of hope had been snuffed out. The despair he’d lost the battle to, and abandoned his dear ones for in his weakness, closed over him like the mouth of some giant sea creature swallowing him whole. There was no escaping this prison. He did not fight when the Maiar wrapped their Power around him, dragging him down into a burial of cold stone. 

The Maiar led him in no long trek through grey halls cloaked in Vairë’s tapestries. He did not pass through rooms and brush against the souls of dead Elves. He did not catch a glimpse of his father, and learn if Finwë was proud of him, or if his father’s thought was still bent solely upon his firstborn. He did not get to touch his soul against his daughter’s and say the goodbye he never got to say in life. 

One moment he stood before the Valar’s thrones, and the next before the door of his cell. But there the Maiar paused, perhaps some shriveled compassion in their desert hearts stirred to give him this last moment to gather himself before the door shut behind him, leaving him alone in cold darkness until the World’s Breaking.

Voices whispered, rustling like dead leaves down a forest path, the echoes of souls who had come before. They had embedded themselves in the stonework, and the long shadows of halls where even the light bled with darkness. They pressed against him, a litany of horror: _Let me see my wife-son-father-daughter one last time! Please! Have mercy! Curse you to Morgoth’s pits!_

Hung upon the wall next to the door was a tapestry. Dragon-fire blackened a world of wild-flowers and green plains stretching for miles and miles, and turned it into a land of choking-ash. A single rider dared the blackened plain, burring whitehot with defiance. His face carried the weight of a thousand thousand dead, and his eyes a heart long broken.

How long had he been dead that a tapestry of his fall had been woven and hung, made ready to mark the cell of the fool who’d thought, even for a moment of bleakest despair, that death would taken this pain away? He never should have ridden out. 

Oh, Fingon. Forgive me. _Forgive me_.

A monster stood at iron gates to meet the star self-imploding like a supernova. There stood the architect of the Noldor’s destruction, of his family’s, of his brother’s. Three shinning jewels had been stitched into Morgoth’s crown, and Fingolfin wanted to rip them out like his gut had burned to rip them from the Cursed One’s brow. 

He had drifted like the puff of a dandelion’s head on the breeze, and the Maiar had not caught him back. He pressed against the violation of the jewels that had held such a measure of Fëanor’s heart, wishing he could reach through time and cast them from the mocking brow as he had not had the power to do in life.

—The ship’s deck vibrated with violence. The sails strained to bulging point, and masts screamed and splintered to rain shards down on the deck. The ship’s captain shouted orders. His golden curls were cropped short like a Man’s, but his eyes held the life of the Eldar in the blue of a perfect sea. His ship was going down. Down into the World’s Ending.

The ship flew straight and true towards a monstrous hole of unlight that knew no light for it feasted upon it, devouring the world. This hole of blackness and hurricane-power, straddled a mountain top, feet planted in the earth and laying everything in their path to waste.

The skies howled and the mountains groaned as they were pulled down the gullet that would eat the world whole. Arien battled for escape from its greed, but the pull of the darkness was slowly sucking the sun closer.

This black hole of covetous and devastation was all that was left of the mightiest being to ever walk Arda. Ugliness and terror was everything that remained of the one once called Melkor.

Upon the brow of the flying ship stood a Man. The world screamed its death around him, but his eyes, a grey Elven-bright, had fixed themselves upon the Doom of the World with the wildness of obsession, of a life lived as plaything to a Dark God and this his hour of vengeance. 

In his hand he held a black sword, thrust up in defiance. A cry, the scream of a hawk swooping on its prey, wrenched its way up from his chest. At his side, hand linked to hand, stood a star. Silver hair whipped a war-banner behind the one who wore a star’s brilliance knit into his skin, and in his hand he bore a mighty yew bow.—

Fingolfin pulled back. He might be driven insane by the time the end of the world fell, but Morgoth’s day of reckoning would come. Fingolfin would go willingly into his burial if only he could ensure his loved-ones would be there on that day. At least let them escape this fate. Give him that, if he could have nothing else.

The time for his gathering of courage up, one of the Maia stepped forward and placed a hand on the door. Locks unspun from spells layered upon spells at the touch. The Maia stepped back, leaving the door open the crack Fingolfin’s needed to slip through.

Fingolfin stared long at that sliver of waiting darkness. But finally, without a word or a threatening prod from the Maiar, he passed from the dim light of the hall and into his prison. The sight that greeted him would have sent him to his knees if he still had them, and driven a spike of raw emotion through even his mask. Oh. _Oh_. 

He had believed there was no mercy to be found in any corner of Arda. He had believed himself helpless before the Powers of the world, doomed to Ages alone until he was driven to madness. But see, see? There was yet hope, even for those cursed by gods.

He was not alone.

Souls gathered to greet him, the souls of his people. He moved through them, their essence brushing against his. They clustered closer, eagerness in the vibration of their light: _My king. It is King Fingolfin! My lord, beloved lord!_

But after the wonder of his coming passed, their touch spoke their sorrow; they mourned. If they had eyes they would be weeping. Their king, their king was dead! 

Aredhel, a formless spirit of restless whitelight, forged a path through the souls crowding close to their king. She came to him, and they melded, white and blue fire, as they had not matched in life for so long his arms had forgotten the feel of his daughter’s weight within. Sorrow and regret clung to her like rags, fraying a once fearless spirit. But she had always put on the face of the indomitable one. Underneath, she had been terrified of her own fragility that would sweep her up with the power of an ocean’s tide and dash her against the rocks. Helpless. Trapped in the sea of her own mind.

He would heal her with a kiss if he knew how. His spirit soared, blazing with a blue fire he did not conceal, not here, with these. But underneath the joy and relief of discovering his fate would not be alone, he was weary. Despair and grief had worn him down. He was still the Elf who’d ridden out to death, seeking a freedom from the terrible weight he stumbled under.

He cradled her within his spirit, as he had cradled her in his arms as a babe, for only a few moments; he cradled her for the turning of an Age. The past and future flowed through them, around them, and yet out of their reach for they could not influence its course. They looked upon eternity as if through a dewdrop, and for every note in the Song’s past and future unraveled, a thousand more hid their secrets from them. 

He went in search for one such secret. He passed through hundreds of souls, all reaching out to brush against the heat of his _fëa_ , searching the hall that reached up in a tower like the cell he had first been held in, but there was no glass roof of stars for the Kinslayers, only a prison of stone. He lingered only to trail comfort with his touch to his people seeking his strength and light (always), before pressing on. A thousand souls, a thousand more, in an endless hall of grey stone where and shadows curled like snakes in all the places the light of Elven-souls could not push them back.

Empty. An empty, hollow place caved in inside him. He could not find him. He was not here with him in this grave of stone that smelt like the ashes of a thousand pyres. 

But he _had_ to be here, because Fingolfin couldn’t bear…he couldn’t…never to see him again. Never. Again. The world staggered, tripped, sliding into the gleaming jaws of a darkness that knew no end. Cold, it was so cold, in here. It was stumbling across the ice, one more footfall, just one more, tears freezing on his cheeks before they fell, and the emptiness of starvation in his chest, and so cold, cold, cold where the fire of the world had reached into his heart and torn it out, carrying it away in hands he _ached_ to have pressing all their starfire into his skin, but never would feel, never, never, never because the hands that carried his heart away to strangle in their cruel, cruel grasp (don’t leave me, brother, please, please, just once, just once don’t leave me all alone) had abandoned him to die, freezing to death without the fire of the world to curl his aching chest into.

There was blood seeping between the bow of his ribs, the shredded remains of his chest that had been ripped apart so this _anguish_ could claw its way in. The sky wheeled dark and immense as a universe where all the stars had been snuffed out.

No!

He would not fall to his knees, curl into a ball and scream into his fist, trying to stuff the broken back in. He would not hold himself, rocking and keening in the sand, alone, because he had to keep it all inside.

He had come to the end of himself. He could not close the scars of his bleeding, empty chest with bandages wrapped tight, tight, tight like stitches holding his skin together. It would not hold. Not this time. There were no bandages left, no deeper down he could stuff himself, no one more step he could endure. 

All the layers and layers and stitches upon stitches and masks sunk into masks shattered. He was unleashed. He exploded like a star’s birth.

Heat like the belly of a volcano crackled in the air, hazing and warping it with the sunburst of his _fëa_. Like a detonation, like the crashing of a meteoroid through the atmosphere, his _fëa_ burst out in flames of blue and the heat of a furnace, and ate through all the shadowed corners of the hall, crashing over the souls of his people. But they did not drown; they turned into the heat, basking in the fire that burned all the hope-devouring cold away. 

/NÁMO!/ Fingolfin’s shout rang piecing and clear as a trumpet blast off Barad Eithel’s battlements. The very walls of the hall shook with shockwaves, stone-dust shaking loose, as his shout echoed back and back and back. 

Like dust swirling up from its pile in a corner, Námo materialized in the hall before Fingolfin who shone brighter than any star. Voice like an animated corpse, he spoke: “Fingolfin Finwëion brings disturbance to the Halls of the Dead.”

There were no coils left to wind around this _fury_ inside him born of a cup of suffering and grief he could bear no more. His spirit crackled and vibrated and flashed lightning-bright, no masks left to hide all this inside him. He threw like a javelin, like sharpened diamond: /Where is Fëanor? Where is my brother?/

“That is none of Fingolfin Finwëion’s concern. Your place in my halls is one of contemplation upon your crimes—” 

/Is that where Fëanor is? Contemplating his crimes? Only he is not here with his people, so tell me, lord of rotted gods, _what have you done with him?_ /

Námo kept his hands folded before him, veiled face tilted down to inspect Fingolfin for a stretch of time that had no measure in these timeless halls. At last he spoke in a voice as emotionless as a stone, “Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion dwells here within my halls, and shall unto the Remaking of Arda.”

/That does not answer my question of what you have done with him. Have you buried him in some dark hole with skeletons to keep him company for all the Ages of the world? Or do you have him hanging by the neck somewhere, strangling for eternity, the punishment of the rebel prince who dared defy you? Do you feast on his screams like gluttons upon a banquet? Do you cut out his tongue just to sew it back in again and again and again, delighting in sawing off that diamond-edged blade that cut your rot open for the world to see? _Tell me what you have done with my brother!_ /

“The Halls of the Dead are sacred. There is no vengeance to be found within the hearts of its lord or his servant, nor upon the scales of justice. Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion received the same weighing of justice as every Elf who enters my halls. He resided not in the Hall of the Kinslayers by his own choice. Not I, nor my servants, keep him from this hall by lock or cage or force of will.”

Was there any scrap of truth to the Valar’s words? Or were they all truth, but twisted truth? Or had Fëanor indeed chosen against coming to the Hall of Kinslayers, and now dwelt with his mother or Finwë somewhere in these halls, somewhere safe and not alone in darkness. But why would the Valar ever grant Fëanor a choice? 

/Take me to him. I would see my brother and witness with my own eyes the truth or lies of your words./

“Fingolfin Finwëion’s place in my halls is here in the Hall of Kinslayers. He shall not be taken before Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion.”

/I will not believe the words of a Vala until I see their truth with my own eyes. Your words are not the words of logic. Why would Fëanor not be here amongst the Kinslayers when he shed Elven-blood along with us? Why but that you are keeping him locked away in torment somewhere!/

“Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion does not dwell within Hall of Kinslayers by his own choice. So swears Námo, Lord of the Dead, and let all in this hall be witness to his words, and if he be shown false, let the Lords of Arda cast him out into the Darkness.” The words fell like the dropping of stones into a deep, dark well that echoed back their splash with the sound of a bell tolling in mine shafts cut into the bedrock of the world. The Vala’s word had been given, and witnessed, and if he spoke false, his fate would be the Darkness whether he or his kin tried to wiggle out of his broken word or not.

Must Fingolfin take the Vala’s words as truth, then? Perhaps. But much could lie sleeping between the words sworn and those unsaid. Fëanor could have many reasons to choose against coming to these halls. Clinging to the hope that he dwelt in peace with Míriel and Finwë was the action of the naïve, or the child. Fingolfin had long since shed both. 

/Is he alone? Are you or your servants inflicting pain and suffering on him?/ 

“Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion does not dwell in isolation. Fingolfin Finwëion has already been given answer to the accusation that any lord or servant in the Halls of the Dead fall to the vice of vengeance.”

The Vala thought to throw sand in his eyes, but he was not blinded. He did not gulp these shadows of answers down and call himself quenched. He needed to _know_. He needed his own eyes raking over Fëanor, standing close enough the blast of heat rolling off his fire-undimmed soaked into him like sunlight warming cold stones. He needed to look upon Fëanor’s naked _fëa_ and see all the places it had not been clawed by the rotten hand of a Death God. He needed his own witness that Fëanor still outshone the stars, unbroken and unbowed, still rocketing through the world like a force of nature with light enough to make heroes of them all.

/Your words wear cloaks. I trust them not. Take me to my brother! I will not yield until I have stood before him!/

“Fingolfin Finwëion will yield and desist sewing discord in the Halls of the Dead, or Fingolfin Finwëion will be removed from the Hall of Kinslayers and isolated until he—” 

Like a flock of eagles a snake had slithered up into the nests of, the army of souls in the Halls of the Kinslayers reared up. Flaming wings of protection encircled Fingolfin, and souls sharpened into talons of light, clawing at the Vala threatening to steal their king from them. Námo was forced back –but only for a moment. He lashed back with his Power, striking the _fëar_ who dared lay hands on their jailer. He tossed them back like a man who reveled in cruelty will kick a dog, or a child weaker than himself.

Fingolfin cut through the air, a sword of blue-flame, at the attacker of his people. But though he sliced through the shadows Námo wove around himself in a shield, there was no end to the layers and layers of swirling grey, and he became like a man lost in the fog. He did not stumble and fall to his knees in defeat, but Power like a shockwave slammed into him and threw him off the Vala, tumbling through the air.

He pulled his unraveled spirit together as a taut silence stomped into the hall. It squeezed the hall like the hand of a giant, its walls seeming to shrink in on them. Námo, a towering pillar of grey shadows, stood, a wide radius parting him and the souls that did not cower, but were wary and clumped close like a shield wall.

“Never before this day has the peace of the Halls of the Dead been broken. Judgment is at hand. Fingolfin Finwëion will answer before the Lords of Arda for his violation of the laws of Mandos.” Námo lifted his hand and roped Fingolfin with Power. Fingolfin had only a moment to blaze against the restraints, before they disappeared from the room in the blinking of a thought, for time and space had no authority here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks and credit goes to mangacrack for her vision of Fëanor re-born (all the Fëanorions) as having the ability to wield fire with the power of their fëa by breaking down the barriers between fëa and hröa. Can anything get more awesome than that?
> 
> Note: Title for this intermission is from the Dylan Thomas’ poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.


	49. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, II

Intermission- Rage, rage against the dying of the light, II

Námo threw Fingolfin down before a half-circle of thrones. Through bound by freezing chains of Power, Fingolfin would not kneel at the feet of false-gods. He struggled up, stretching his spirit until he pulled long and slender like a willow tree that had been crowned with blue fire.

The chamber he found himself in had been built with the geometric structures of a million particles coming together into stone. The halls of Námo bore no gem, no pavement of gold. They were as colorless as the grey of Námo’s cloak, and as ascetic as the thoughts of their maker. 

The Valar sat arrayed in spender and the light that fell upon Fingolfin with the cold breath of these halls. The spark of the divine was as absent from their eyes as the heat of the Flame Imperishable. Such beauty they wore in their faces, but though they had stitched themselves into a likeness of the Children, their faces were lines, planes, and curves arranged the right way but lacking the light of _fëa_ or Mortal soul.

Not all the thrones were occupied. He did not stand before the Valar in the Ring of Doom as Fëanor had, to be judged by those who had never had the right, nor wisdom, to sit in judgment over one of the Children. Manwë, the so-called Lord of Arda, sat enthroned in the circle’s center, his ice queen at his side.

Námo spoke from behind Fingolfin, “Fingolfin Finwëion is brought before the lords of Arda to be judged for violating the laws of Mandos. Will the Lords of Arda hear the accusations against him and undertake his correction?”

“The Lords of Arda accept this task. Let the accusations be told,” Manwë spoke in a voice like the rumble of distant thunder. His eyes were brilliant as lightning. The air around his skin whispered, a soft wind never ceasing its play with his star-white hair. His bones were as perfectly fashioned as his kins,’ but there was nothing behind them. His face showed all the emotion of a marble statute. 

Before Námo could launch into a biased retelling, Fingolfin threw out like light into the night, /As kin of Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion, I have a right to see to my brother’s wellbeing and speak to him, just as Finwë spoke to Míriel after she passed into the Halls of the Dead. If the Valar be not the masters of thralls, as they claimed before Fëanor in the Ring of Doom before the Darkening of Valinor, then they will not withhold the right of kin between brothers. Or else they shall be proved liars, and jailers of the Children just as surely as Morgoth holds thralls captive against their will in his dark fortress!/

“Kinslayers have no rights to demand of the Lords of Arda,” Manwë spoke in a voice that was only there. “Fëanor Þerindë Finwëion is no longer your concern, and I will hear no more demands from the mouth of a Kinslayer. Hold your silence, Fingolfin Finwëion, or be silenced.”

/With your words you prove yourself but one who would be the master of thralls! Liars and rotted gods and thieves of the Light, I name you! Fëanor—/

Manwë’s hand sliced through the air, and Power wrapped itself around Fingolfin, squeezing like strangulation. He would not be muzzled like a dog! He flared and blazed and _burned_ against the bonds binding him in the cold teeth of fish and the gag knocking even the sword of his words from his hand, leaving him muted and chained at the feet of the rotted gods. He would not surrender! But though he fought and threw all his will against them, he could not snap the reins of Power binding him. He was left bucking and kicking against the corral closing in around him, like a wild stallion refusing to break. 

“Let the accusations against Fingolfin Finwëion be told,” Manwë commenced the trial, eyes sliding off Fingolfin’s waning and waxing _fëa_ as it refused to lay down and surrender. 

The other Valar ignored him entirely, as something that had long lost their interest, as if they were so accustomed to watching a soul struggle in their spider’s net the entertainment had long worn off. Only Oromë kept his eyes fixed on Fingolfin where he stood apart from the other Valar, leaning up against the wall, arms folded, forgoing the throne prepared for him.

Námo began reciting Fingolfin’s ‘crimes.’ From the corner of his eye, Fingolfin saw him glide forward, curving around him where he stood bond but unbent as an oak tree. Námo’s gray shroud brushed through him, insubstantial as mist. It passed with the cold hand of justice through his spirit left vulnerable without the shell of body. 

The dimensions of the world unraveled, and Fingolfin saw:

—The Judge lifted up his hands and the dead came forth, beasts of bone and rot. The corpses of horses, the picked skeletons of wolves, and ancient flocks of ravens took the sky on their bony wings. As one army, one mind behind leading them like a conductor his orchestra, a master his puppets, the army of the dead converged on the two Elves standing in defiance against the god of death.

Maedhros’ hair streamed like a sunset in the wind screaming with the voice of a thunderstorm. Lighting forked the sky, but could not outshine those silver eyes challenging the light of noonday. Maedhros lifted up his hands, flames curled like smoke down his arms, and he met the army of the dead with fire.

In the eye of the storm, shoulder-to-shoulder with his beloved, stood Fingon. His hand was lifted up, pointed to the churning heavens. The wind ragged around him, but did not blast him away, for he was its maker and authority. Upon his finger flashed a ring, Power sang in the diamond that laughed at death with teeth tougher than stone.

Maedhros ringed them with flames that did not turn and eat their creator or singe even the garment of his lover no matter how fierce the wind screamed. Then he turned and battled an army. Fingon laughed his defiance at the Vala, the skies roaring black and building above him, and brought down his hand bearing Power in the pulse of a ring to clash with the Power of the heavens against the clawed hand of death.—

His son. The one who he adored. He reached out, hungering, for more. Námo’s words droned on, listing his crimes, but Fingolfin did not hear. Nothing mattered but seeing one more glimpse of his son. He was a man dying of thirst in a desert, crying out for a drop of water. 

To the enthroned Valar he stretched new-born eyes. No, not new-born, these were the eyes of his soul upon whom dimension had no power, and time lost its meaning. Tulkas’ impatience gaze met his search first, and under the bronzed skin of the Vala’s cheeks, Fingolfin sunk himself, down to where Tulkas was only the name given a seed of thought.

— Poldórëa struggled against Oromë. His hair fanned out against the earth in a blanket of silver, gold, and the white of stars. The bones in his face were all shape angles and straight lines of beauty but he was no Elf, no Child of Ilúvatar; inside his dark eyes dwelt no spark of the divine.

“You have to hold him, Oromë! Hold. Him. Down!” Tulkas’ voice strained from the effort of keeping Poldórëa trapped in the form of the Children so he could not melt away and slink back to his new master Melkor.

Oromë wrestled Poldórëa’s arm back behind the other Vala’s back, but Poldórëa was almost a match for Tulkas in strength, and was able to twist away enough to send Oromë flying with a kick of thickly muscled legs. Oromë caught himself in the landing and sprang back through the air to grappled Poldórëa once more.

“And you call this _love_ ,” Poldórëa sneered through his panting.

Oromë gritted his teeth. The muscles of his naked back and arms glistened like polished bronze under the light of the two Lamps from the sweat worked up. “I am doing this _because_ I love you! I will not let you go back to him to ruin yourself!”

Poldórëa laughed, the sound wild and as broken as his eyes. He grabbed a fistful of Oromë’s hair and twisted his knuckles until Oromë cried out, but still Oromë held him pinned into dirt. “If you _loved_ me, you would not have denied me, denied us! We were glory, and you threw it all away to please those who did not accept what we were because of _jealousy_.”

Poldórëa sank his teeth into Oromë’s shoulder. Oromë cried out, and called upon the Power he’d held back in some silly notion of fairness. He had Poldórëa’s belly slammed into the dust a moment later, one arm wrestling Poldórëa’s to pin in the small of his back, the other wrapping around Poldórëa’s neck to grapple him into a choke-hold.

Oromë’s mouth dropped next to Poldórëa’s ear as his lover struggled under him. His voice cracked on the words, “I will fix it. I will fix everything. Just come back. Come home.”

Poldórëa’s eyes shone bright with tears, but his mouth snarled. His body fought, and the words he spat out were his doom, “I will _never_ crawl back to the bed of one who threw me out like shame. I will _never_ return to the home that turned its back on me! At least with Melkor I am not made to feel unclean! I am no dirty secret to hide from the judging eyes of brothers and sister who should have accepted me!”

Oromë kept trying to plead with Poldórëa, unable to see what Tulkas could see, unable to let go. But Tulkas saw that there was nothing left to let go of, for Poldórëa had already ceased to exist. The creature in Oromë’s arms had already fallen passed saving and into a place he did not want to be saved from, and scorned and spat upon the hand offered in rescue. So Tulkas acted as Oromë could not.

It was a simple thing really, to kneel beside this creature who had once been a brother, touch his hand to his shoulder, and sink his Power inside this fragile vessel. While Oromë whispered to Poldórëa to come home, Tulkas quietly set a net of Power about Poldórëa’s mouth and nostrils, and sealed it like wax on a jar. It was better this way, to go down softly into the end, than let what had been Poldórëa live to become what Melkor would make him into.

When Poldórëa began to thrash, eyes bulging, mouth forming words unable to break through the muffling net, Tulkas led his once-brother gently into death, settling a mantel over his mind to mute the panic so he did not alarm Oromë who whispered on in a shaking voice of what life would be like for them –together—when Poldórëa returned home. 

It was better this way.

Poldórëa lay quiet and still under Oromë. Only Tulkas could see how his eyes stared, unblinking, empty. 

“Poldórëa, say you will come back to me. Say you will,” Oromë’s fingers combed through Poldórëa’s hair, arm pulling back from its fierce hold that restrained, but would not have ended Poldórëa’s life. 

“Poldórëa?” Oromë touched Poldórëa’s unmoving shoulder, “Poldórëa?” 

Oromë rolled Poldórëa over onto his back. Poldórëa’s neck moved strangely, limp, the back of his head landing in the dirt, pulled too far back. His mouth still hung open from his last plea to Tulkas’ unmoved heart.

“Poldórëa?” Oromë’s fingers fell upon the slack skin of Poldórëa’s cheek, trembling. He stared. His lips parted in a slow creep towards horror. 

His other hand came up to cradle the back of Poldórëa’s skull, lifting the head, the sightless eyes, closer. “Poldórëa, please. Poldórëa wake up!” 

Oromë’s fingers scrambled over the skin of Poldórëa’s throat, seeking a pulse, and his chest, seeking a beat. “No, no, no. Poldórëa, Poldórëa, wake up!” 

A keening started up in the back of Oromë’s throat, building and building. It did not break from him in a scream when his mouth crumpled into a hole in his face and his head threw back to heaven. His arms pulled his dead lover to his chest, but no sound came out. Oromë screamed in silence, hands digging into the pulse-less flesh, the tendons in his neck straining, until his face blotched red, and he resembled a beast more than a man.

Tulkas rose to his feet, and then shifted there, looking away, and then back again, but still Oromë screamed that silent scream. Tulkas wanted this to be over with. Eventually Oromë would put all this business with Poldórëa behind him and take Vána to wife as Manwë instructed. Then everything would be well again.

When Oromë collapsed over Poldórëa’s body, the scream finally over, Tulkas waited for Oromë to rise so they could begin dealing with what had happened and move on. But Oromë did not pull himself from Poldórëa’s empty body; he pulled it closer. He wrapped himself about Poldórëa and began to weep. In between the wracking sobs, Oromë begged Poldórëa to forgive him, forgive him, forgive him, he hadn’t meant to kill him, please, please, come back, come back.

Tulkas drummed his fingers along the elbow of his crossed arms, shifting his feet. It was a tragedy that Poldórëa had allowed himself to fall and be seduced by Melkor, but his death was a mercy. Oromë would see that in time. 

“It was an accident,” he said. Maybe later, when Oromë was ready to hear, Tulkas could tell him of what he had had to do –for Poldórëa’s own good, for the good of their world—but not yet. “You did not mean for this happen, Oromë, neither of us did. We only sought to help him. We will just have to deal with this unfortunate turn of events.”

Oromë showed no signs of hearing Tulkas but to weep all the louder, voice breaking into a wail Tulkas wanted _away_ from. Deciding he would deal with Oromë when he had calmed himself, Tulkas left.—

Fingolfin pulled from Tulkas’ mind, sickened. His hunger was left unquenched. He tossed aside the revelation of Tulkas’ murderous past, needing another glimpse of Fingon, for he was dying, dying of thirst. His seeking turned to the next Vala, finding the dusty-rose brown skin, curls like shadows, and the soulful-eyes of the Ever-Young. A mere touch of his thought upon her pulled him from the present dimension.

—Nielíqui walked naked through the grass, bare-feet arching and dropping with a grace only Nessa could rival. The curve of her hips moved Vána’s blood like the tides, and Nielíqui’s words whispered back to her from nights they lay together, Nielíqui’s mouth dancing with a slow smile like silk as she pressed her body down into Vána’s: there is no shame in desire, no cup of pleasure they could not drink when Vána lay in the cage of Nielíqui’s arms. Desire was not defined by the shape of the body riding theirs. 

When Nielíqui turned to beckon Vána with a bat of her lashes, a single sliding glance out of the corner of her eye, Vána followed. She was lost, she was found, in the crooks of a bud mouth and the slide of soft curves over hers.—

Nessa cut through Námo’s monologue, “Why am I forced from my woods into these cold halls of stone for this?” Her voice carried the scent of wild beasts, and cool, green things in the roots of a forest. The pelt of a wolf crowned her shoulders, and deerskin sheathed her athletic body. She gestured at Fingolfin, “He is an Exile, and already dead. Námo summoning us here to wax over broken laws is like cowering in fear before a toothless, clawless pup. This Child is _irrelevant_. Nothing but a has-been king.” 

Námo answered, voice as implacable as the deeps of space, “Without the meriting out of justice, the Symphony will unbalance, and chaos reign. The Laws of Mandos were broken, punishment must be served.” 

Tulkas stirred, growing restless on his throne. “Any balance of the world was tipped long ago. Chaos reigns, and his name is Melkor! It is passed time we threw him down!”

“Enough, Tulkas,” Manwë leashed Tulkas’ restless energy. “The Lords of Arda are gathered for the judgment of Fingolfin Finwëion. We have heard a listing of his crimes, and the breaking of the peace of Mandos is no trivial deed.”

Aulë said, the scent of a forge flooding the chamber, “Fingolfin is newly come to Mandos’ Halls, and though he is Kinslayer and Exile, still I remember the days he sat as Ruling Prince of Tirion and brought order back into the city’s streets. Let a second chance be granted. He is like a metal that has been poorly forged and riddled with imperfections, but is not beyond salvaging in the hands of a skilled smith.”

“Fingolfin Finwëion broke the laws of Mandos. The consequence for his actions is a judgment before the Lords of Arda. He must abide by the final judgment of Manwë Súlimo,” Námo, the Judge devoid of compassion that were beyond his comprehension, said.

Nessa tossed her head, the beads and feathers strung through her dark her clinking, “There are more laws to the world than what fits onto those dusty scales of yours. If the hunter is scratched by his prey, than that is his own fault for lacking the skill to subdue that which he would claim mastery over. Prey will fight back, that is the law of nature, and if the hunter tore off more than he could chew, he deserves what he gets. Don’t you agree, brother?” she twisted in her throne where she sat, legs draped over the armrest, to seek Oromë.

“What I think is irrelevant,” Oromë jaw clenched. His arms crossed tighter against his chest, muscles cutting strong lines under bronze skin. He had not moved from his sentinel post, holding himself apart from the proceedings.

He shifted his stance, turning his shoulder another few inches away from the other Valar. His gaze fell on Fingolfin. Fingolfin did not seek the breaking of time, but it fell upon him with the touch of Oromë’s eyes, dark as shadows.

—Oromë wandered the wild lands of Endor, searching for ghosts, for the one he had loved and killed. He would find a way to bring him back. In the deep shadows under forests of pine he found his Poldórëa’s eyes, in the laughter of the wind his voice, in the glimmer of starlight upon a lake’s surface his mane. He smelt Poldórëa in the untamed forests of the West, tasted his unashamed sensuality in the fruits of the South, touched his skin in the silkworms of the East, and found his indomitable spirit in the proud lands of mountains and ice in the North. 

He found Poldórëa everywhere, sunk into the land itself as if his bodiless spirit had become one with it, but forever out of reach. The spirit of an Ainu could not be banished from the world, but once a form was destroyed, another could not be formed but through the aid of some outside Power. But Oromë could not snatch a glimpse of him long enough to catch him.

When he stumbled upon the Children, he realized how he could bring Poldórëa back. He snuck among them, cloaking his Power, and appearing as one of their own. He fell in love with them, the idea of them, the echo of Poldórëa he saw in each one of them, so different from the Valar. It was good, it was right, that the blood of the Children Poldórëa would have loved, would bring Poldórëa home.

It was a slow work –the imprinting of a culture, a religion—but one he delighted in as much for the secret life he lived beside the Children, as for the final outcome. He showed them what a few drops of their blood could buy –a connection to two dead Valar, one murdered, one ending her own life, whose faded spirits had joined so closely with Arda they were of it. The Elves named the Power in their wonder and ignorance, calling this force they grew to honor and worship the Land.

Sacrifices to the Land grew, a few drops of blood sprinkled with the spark of the divine here and there. Oromë searched the winds whispering with Poldórëa’s voice. He searched the starlight holding the glimmer of Poldórëa’s eyes. He searched the lofty peeks of mountains where the eagles cried with Poldórëa’s proud spirit. But he could not hold the shadows of his lover long enough to grasp anything more than memory.

He began peering into the eyes of the Children, hoping to find a match with starlight. He took the little ones darting like silver fish into his arms, and searched their faces for the one he’d lost. Poldórëa was in all of them, and in none of them. 

He found Poldórëa the day he knelt under starlight and slit the veins of his wrist. He fed his blood to the Land, to the memory of his lover, and called him home.

He clenched his fist, and blood squeezed dark and fast down the curve of his palm to drip into the earth. The wind ceased its gentle flutter, the birds silenced their soft cooing, and the forest lay quiet and watchful. The pad of a paw in loose soil spun him around, eyes eager with a hunger stretching back Ages. He knew his lover even dressed in the skin of an animal. Poldórëa’s eyes glinted at him, and the Direwolf’s pelt shone sleek as starlight. 

Poldórëa prowled closer, close enough for Oromë to see that though his lover’s eyes still rivaled the stars, there was nothing soft inside that glint. Nothing even human.

But Oromë could not surrender his hope. He had hoped for nothing but this moment for thousands of years. He had labored his secret labor with this and only this as his goal. He could not accept the truth before him so easily.

“Poldórëa. It is I, Oromë.” The Direwolf stepped closer, lip pulling back over its canines. Still Oromë could not see past his desperate love and into the eyes devoid of it, only vengeance and an animalistic hunger swirling inside. “I know I do not deserve your forgiveness, but I have come back to you. And I promise I will never leave you again. I _swear it_.”

The Direwolf leapt with a snarl. And Oromë, the great hunter, was powerless to defend himself against the one he had already killed once. Poldórëa closed his teeth over Oromë’s jugular, fangs sinking in, blood spurting out of Oromë’s tore throat. Oromë fell beneath the immense weight and power of his lover with a cry, hands rising on instinct to fight the wolf off. 

The Direwolf only tightened its hold. Oromë screamed, never had he felt such pain as this. He felt it in his heart that Poldórëa would kill him, as Oromë had killed him. Oromë deserved to die at Poldórëa’s hand, but he could not stop his body from fighting back against the pain and encroaching death.

Poldórëa did not kill him. He did something worse. He released Oromë, leavening him savaged in the dirt and peering into the angular face of an animal with his blood on its fangs. And then he left him there, abandoned, utterly forsaken, upon the unfeeling breast of the land Poldórëa had become one with.—

Oromë, like the other Valar, did not appear aware of Fingolfin’s glimpse into the past. Fingolfin did not concern himself with the past, a famine raged inside him. His Fingon was lost to him, unless death brought him into these halls, and in this prison he would remain until the World’s Breaking.

He could rage and fight until he’d spent all the fire inside him, throw himself against the Valar’s bonds for eternity; he had not the strength to break them. He could fling his demands at them like casting thunderbolts through the sky; they would brush him off like the annoyance of a gnat buzzing in their ear. Rotten, blighted flesh that they were, heart-eaters and stones in their chests, they were still Power, and he but the naked soul of a Child. Decayed though they were, sat before him were the Powers that had shaped mountains, delved oceans, and birthed stars. He was an Elf that had had his body broken under Morgoth’s boot, his life and all the fire inside him purchasing nothing but wounds in his enemy’s _foot_.

Despair crept back in; his back broke all over again in this long slide of defeat. He would never again walk so close to fire he ate the breath of flame and cupped the brilliance of stars in his hands. He would never see Fëanor one last time. Just one last time, once and for forever, just once. That was all he needed, just once to kiss, once to love, once to whisper his heart into his brother’s skin so that Fëanor would know, always, always, never to be forgotten.

But there was no mercy to be found in hearts turned long ago from the suffering for the Elves. There was no Nienna to beseech. And in the one called the most beloved of the Eldar, Varda, there was only a face as far away from this earth as the stars. No compassioned nestled in her haughty skin, no rescue from the cold darkness of the halls awaiting him in the night of her thick hair adorned with stars and the white diamonds of her head-dress. Her skin played at snow’s innocence, as the long line of paint drawn out from the corners of her eyes played at fairest-of-them-all. But beauty is as beauty does, and Fingolfin had found more beauty in the faces of Mortal crones.

Her eyes, playing at light, dropped to catch him in their star-gaze, as if feeling his thoughts upon her.

—Varda birthed stars into the galaxy in an attempt to reach that quintessential moment of beauty when all the Ainur had lifted up their voices together in one perfect note. They used to shake the foundations of distant universes when their voices swelled in the crescendo. That had been the zenith of her existence. Everything that came after was her trying to reach that perfect moment of harmony again.

The other Ainur celebrated her work, calling it beautiful as they gazed up at her stars from where their feet firmly planted in the rock of the planet the All Father had given them. But none of her brothers and sisters consented to leaving the world they were enchanted with to swim the Encircling Seas with her. None but him.

“Is it not glorious, Sister! Is it not wondrous, this existence?” Melkor had his arms thrown wide, the child-like grin on his face brighter than the interstellar dust of stars swirling around them.

“Yes. Glorious.” She trailed her fingertips through the clouds of gas, hydrogen and helium spilling into each other, swilling in billowing clouds of blueberry blue, the purples of flowers, and the red of Vána’s mouth.

Melkor dropped his arms, wearing the dust of stars on his skin and entangled in his hair flung out behind him, swirling on and on and on until its night became one with the nebula. He smiled a crooked smile, the dimple in his chin intoxication. All were lost in the curves of his smile, drowning themselves for one taste of the possibilities he wore like scent. They went down quietly, eyes wide in awe of him, giving themselves up to ruin gladly in the lure of his voice, more charismatic than the morning star.

He held his hand out to her as the birth place of stars billowed around them, “We will travel paths far beyond the mastery of our simple brethren. Dance with me up here in the starlight only you and I treasure as it ought to be treasured. We are not like them, you and I, we are special. So come, dance with me. You will be my queen, and I your king.”

She found the memory of a hundred voices lifted up in perfect harmony inside his smile. She found the promise of everything she had been searching for since she fell from heaven under the wings of ambition, wanting, as all her brothers and sisters who had chosen this world over All Father’s side, for works of their own hands. She found the promise of her completion in him. 

But she did not take his hand. If she folded her hand into his, she would no longer be her anymore. She would only be his. 

If she took his hand, he would lead her into the paths of ecstasy beyond the wildest stretch of her thoughts –for a time. Until he grew bored of her. She would be left upon the rocks after ridding the highs of his seas, and even there, broken and abandoned, she would thirst for him.

She did not take his hand. She chose the slow destructed of Ages, and the search for a perfection she would never find again in any arms, in any beauties, in any works of her hands.—

Fingolfin shook off the glimpse into her past. His heart could be moved to pity for what she had fallen to –she sat enthroned in embellished beauty, but had been fairer as a seed of naked thought—but her heart would not be moved towards the same for him.

The debate over Fingolfin’s punishment waxed on. Tulkas latched onto Nessa logic of nature’s natural course, grasping the laws of the wild as he did not the passionless scales of Mandos. He threw his voice in with Aulë’s, counseling to sweep the matter under the rug, and move on to more important business: crushing Melkor. Combined with the apathy of the other Valar –who had long grown indifferent to the Children and their affairs, like children tossing away toys that no longer amused them—the weight of the council pulled towards concluding the trial with haste and little bother with punishment. Fingolfin was dead, after all, toothless and clawless, just a has-been king fallen into irrelevance with his death.

The final judgment lay with Manwë though, who had spoken little after gagging Fingolfin. Fingolfin turned his gaze upon the Valar’s king, pressing against the skin of that flawless, ice-cold face. 

—Manwë was the first to see their new brother. Father took him, and only him, into the hall where light grew like seeds. Father led to the place the new brother rolled around on his back, trying to capture his tinny toes in equally tinny fingers. Father picked up the new brother who made a grab for Father, laughing, face shinning brighter than even Varda’s. 

Father handed the new brother to Manwë, and Manwë took the bundle of light and tinny appendixes into his arms. It rested against his chest like a storm of heat. “This is your brother, Manwë. He will be called Melkor, and you will love him. Love him as you will love no other.”

And Manwë had.

From that first moment, Melkor enchanted him. The Father had molded Manwë from the threads of his tenderness. Manwë was born to be mercy. 

Manwë gave everything he was ever meant to be to Melkor, pouring it out into his brother who never seemed to have enough –of anything. Manwë filled the chalice of Melkor’s need with his love, and then he picked up the messes, always taking Melkor back, his forgiveness waiting for Melkor long after their brothers and sisters had grown weary. 

Forgiving and forgiving and forgiving.

Until he could forgive no more. Until he’d broken his heart for Melkor for the last time, and only emptiness remained. He had forgiven until his heart could not bear the pain of Melkor’s scornful laughter and skillfully-forged words like weapons, so he shut it off. It was easy, so easy; it should not be this easy to turn his back on everything the Father had created him to be. But it was.

He found he could breathe without pain. Without anything. He felt nothing. 

When he met Melkor upon the battlefield under lighting and thunder, no secret place inside him yearned to bring Melkor home again. He looked into the eyes of the brother he had loved above all others, watched Melkor’s mouth curl into the smile he had been wielding against Manwë since before time had measure, and heard the taunting voice that had brought him to his knees call him _brother_. There was no answer from his heart because it had already slipped through the spaces between his ribs to die upon the desert sand of Melkor’s heart that had never called Manwë’s enough to fill the clamor for _more_.

But it was not just the pain he cut from himself when he snapped Melkor’s power over him. In taking away the pain, he had made himself the opposite of himself. 

Mercy destroyed Manwë. And after he lost his, he came to fear it in others. He feared the compassion shining in Eönwë’s eyes, so he snapped a collar about the Maia’s neck and killed it like he’d killed his own.

The memories of who he had once been and the brother he had once loved remained, but they were distance from him. He looked upon the past as one removed from it. He studied it like another’s life, seeing all the times Melkor had used his love for him only to hand Manwë’s heart back on a platter, eyes mocking him, still burning with light, but the light of a pyre now, not the stars.—

Fingolfin looked upon this Vala who had caused so much misery, all of these Valar with their destructive inability to handled what it meant to _feel_ , and saw only the dead faces of young men he’d sent into battle against the dark brother these Valar, these _children_ , should have dealt with long ago. They had chosen to hide from their mistakes instead.

Manwë stirred, the air around him swirling and funneling, feeding off the wind of his being. He proclaimed Fingolfin’s judgment: “The crimes of Fingolfin Finwëion have been heard, council taken, and now judgment passed. Let Fingolfin Finwëion heed the warning of Manwë Súlimo, Lord of Arda, and witness the mercy of the Valar who he, in his ignorance and hubris, named jailers and the masters of thralls. Fingolfin Finwëion’s crimes deserve punishment by the scale of Mandos’ measure, yet warning only shall I press upon him. Stumble again, Fingolfin Finwëion, break the laws of Mandos, sow discord in the House of the Dead, and you shall reap what you sow and be banished from the Hall of the Kinslayers and held in isolation until the Breaking of the World. You have been warned and granted mercy underserved, go from this place and meditate on your misdeeds.”

Calcium and carbon compounds split open like a rock floor caving-in, sucking him down the gullet of a hungry whale, to be spit out onto cold stones and shadows crawling in the corners. Not alone, for his people crowded close, rubbing up against him, passing him a multitude of relief and love like kisses. Aredhel was there, wrapping formless whitelight around him. He kissed them all back, his mighty, glorious people, with comfort and the strength of the mountain’s roots on his lips, feeding it to them like wine, and somehow he never ran dry, for he was the rock they stood upon, and their feet found no cracks within the sturdy stone of his bones.

But it was a lie. He felt burned out, a candle gutted. Nothing left, all hope sucked from his heart like an oyster from its shell. The despair veined him in deep roots of black threading through his soul, yet still he burned a clear, bright blue fire. The bandages had been rewound, the layers pulled back over the empty, bleeding hole in his chest, the masks reformed, holding it all inside, tighter, tighter, tighter. He was their king, and they needed him to be strong.

He would not beat his fists against the cold, unfeeling stone, and scream all this empty out inside. He would not light up the world with a blast of heat and fire. He didn’t have enough inside him. He was not Fëanor. He was only himself; Fingolfin who had sharpen himself into a sword of starlight only to find he was but a child beating his fists against a mountain side. He had been laid low, bound, gagged, helpless, chewing on the bit they’d slip into his wild stallion’s mouth with the bitter taste of defeat.

His light burned cold, dowsed of heat. He would never turn his mouth and meet a kiss of fire. He would never walk into a room and see Fëanor look up, catching him in eyes that never looked away, that looked into him and saw something worth cradling inside their starbright shine. But then, Fëanor never had, had he? Maybe, for a time, when they were children, he had seen something worth a second glance, but what of the man Fingolfin had grown into, wound so tight, walking so softly, with skin like tree roots his people could stand on, but curled around the barrenness inside? Would Fëanor have ever looked at him, as he was now, the man who had not had the strength of heart to endure, who had fallen to despair, and seen anything worth stopping to stare?

He wished he could have seen Fëanor one last time. He had been coming with a kiss, remember? And maybe Fëanor would not have turned a mouth of fire back into his, but Fingolfin would have known what it felt like to brush up against its heat for one moment that lasted all the Ages of this world, tucked there in the bow of his ribs, swelling in the empty spaces between.

He wished he could have come to Fëanor with hope on his fingertips, pressing them into Fëanor’s heart with the news: your sons thrive. They have built a new life for themselves full of joy, far from the horror of loss and war. Maedhros has healed. He relearned the curves of a smile, and Fingolfin had grinned and covered his eyes when he stumbled upon Maedhros and Fingon making love. 

But none of those were true. The truth was: Fingolfin remembered Maedhros’ ruined body, and sitting with him through the night as he thrashed in the throes of nightmares, waking with screams and blood in his mouth where he’d bitted through his tongue, only to find the agony waiting for him in the waking-world, for the nightmares were memories, and he’d re-opened all the mutilated places on his body. 

But the worst was not even the way he’d screamed –like nothing human for he’d fallen past a horror the mind could grapple with—it was the lack of anything in his eyes. Even weeks after Fingon brought him back, Maedhros would awaken from the nightmares and there would be those terrible first moments when he didn’t recognize Fingolfin, didn’t recognize _Fingon_ , because he was looking into a black hole and there was no light, no life, no nothing inside its crush, only the pain.

It would have killed Fëanor to have sat where Fingolfin sat, at Maedhros’ bedside, hand curled into a fist on his thigh because Maedhros had flinched from his touch like a blow. It would have destroyed any father to see their son ruined like Maedhros was ruined, but Fëanor…Fëanor who felt everything with the power and wildness of a hurricane, it would have driven him mad if he had not already been.

But though unspoken words would have piled up like ash, Fingolfin would have imparted this truth from his fingertips into Fëanor’s heart: your sons never stopped loving you. They forgave you, of course they did; they just want you back.

But Fingolfin had failed. Fëanor was somewhere in these halls, not alone but far, far from at peace (how could he be at peace, separated from his sons?). Fingolfin had failed to save him. He hadn’t had the strength. And he couldn’t…he couldn’t… he would never see him again. All the hope ate itself into starvation in his chest.

How could it end like this? The prisoners of rotted gods, the lamentations of a thousand thousand souls crying out for a mercy that would never be granted, because there was no grace left in this world. There was only grey, cold, and shadows devouring themselves in the dark, and all the Ages of the world separated from the one who could have plucked the sun from the sky and passed it into their cupped hands where it warmed their skin with hot, blazing, _hope_.

And then the threads of the Great Song threaded even here in this place that could never have been ordained by the will of any being of mercy, plucked like a harp string, like a single heart-swelling note of grace, and Fingolfin saw:

—The skies burned. A white light so much more than lightning consumed them. The light was a mockery of the Flame Imperishable, though it was playing at imitation, at equality. Taniquetil, the Valar’s holy mountain and the peak of the world, rumbled and groaned under the Power standing astride its crown. Manwë’s face shone pitiless down upon those who dared to challenge the might of the Valar. His Power sunk into the depths of the earth and shook its pillars. The land split open beneath the hammer stroke of his wrath.

Fingolfin’s sword blazed with a white light the antithesis of Manwë’s. Blue fire danced over his skin, his _fëa_ too full to be contained by _hröa_ for he was Fingolfin Re-born. Upon one who had existed without body, the bonds of a perishable body held no dominion.

Laughter like thunder turned his head to the Elf running beside him up the slopes of a mountain that would not keep them from their vengeance. Fëanor’s _fëa_ danced in the air above his skin, a burning too bright to be bound in flesh. Eyes more glorious than the morning fixed with defiance and laughing joy upon the Vala who had thought he could be controlled.

Bullets of lightning shot down from the hand of the one who claimed authority over Arda. Fëanor’s _fëa_ blazed up, and its substance flowed out from him and into the world they were the true masters of, like wave upon unending wave of a rising tide. Fire met bullets of lightening and consumed them. 

In that moment Fëanor was too terrible, too magnificent, to look upon. Fingolfin was swept up on wings of awe.—

Hope ignited in his chest, the despair cast off like a mourning shroud; it had lost its hold over him. He would not go gently into that slow slide of quick sand, that slow consumption. He would not collapse into himself, light devoured, until there was so little of him left, he might as well cease to exist, all the grief leached away along with the hope and joy and love. 

If he allowed the despair to conquer him, he would be abandoning his dear ones for a second time. He could not bear the thought of Fingon coming to these cold halls one day, and finding nothing left of his father but a flickering light in a corner’s shadow, not enough left of him to put his arms around and chase the cold of Ages away together, side-by-side as they always had been.

Fingolfin would not abandon his son. Not this time. Not ever again. He cut the despair from his heart like the blight it was, and burned it between the furnace-blaze of his hope. This was not the end. And he would be there when they threw the prison doors open and walked like newborn stars into the light.

*

Vairë came veiled like a woman on a dusty desert road, and just as desolate. She was like a melon that, when split open, revealed all its flesh had already been hollowed out. If her tongue had not been cut out, Fëanor had never heard it rustle in her mouth, and if she had eyes behind that veil, they would be the dead eyes of a fish.

She set up her loom –facing away from him this time, it was one of _those_ torments, the ones where the tapestry took shape under her spindly fingers while he hung from the noose of which son-what happened-not dead-not captured-what new suffering must they endure this time-all his fault-all his fault. With the loom faced away from him, he wore blinders like a horse, and gnawed on his wrists, chewing on skin and heart and fear and grief and so much guilt it got stuck in his throat on the way down.

It was like a game. Him, swinging from the rope, face bloating, lips blackening, suffocating on the thousand horrors he envisioned between the moment she angled the loom away and the one she turned it back for him to feast his eyes on the horror. Some-torments-of-loom played out differently, during those torments, she’d let him watch the slow spinning of web, his imagination weaving the final horror a thousand different ways before she’d tied the last knot.

The-torments-of-the-loom were an anguish far, far beyond anything the hyenas and their torture’s plies could inflict. But they were also the bread he torn into like a starving man. They were his only glimpse of the world outside his prison cell of darkness and looming silver scales that drip, drip, dripped to the rhythm of his torment. They were his only window to his sons. 

He had made them so many promises: I will never leave you, I will always be there for you, I will protect you –always. I _promise_.

There could be no forgiveness for what he had done. They needed him, he had promised them he would never leave them, that he would be there with them even if the Earth ripped open or all the peoples of the world turned their faces from them, he, _he_ , would remain. Forever.

There could be no forgiveness. 

She never wove a single simmering thread of gold into the tapestries, no joy. There was no silver like peace, no shimmering emerald for healing, but while she may have the dead eyes of a fish, she thought herself the hand of justice just like her husband, so she could not weave a lie. Even if she picked through the truth like a vulture through bones, Fëanor would not, _would not_ , accept that his sons lives had been utterly stripped of joy, shredded of every light in the world like a tree its bark. He couldn’t accept. And he knew it wasn’t true, because in every single tapestry her spider-hands had woven, red threads ran through every moment of suffering, even the ones of Maedhros’ torture, even there in hell the red threads endued: the red of love. 

Love wove itself alongside the blackened, diseased trunk of suffering, like a sapling opening new buds with the spring. But no, like a cedar that had stood a thousand years, because an axe hacking itself to pieces against the red threads would not snap a single strands.

He waited, chewing on himself, for the-torment-of-the-loom to be poured over his head like boiling oil. What would the loom show him this time? Did Maedhros still have the nightmares, and stand out on the battlements in the North wind when the decay of Angband rode heavy in the air? Did Curufin still try to cut the world on the ice of his tongue? Had he found any healing in this world, because that heart of ice and salt wasn’t him; Fëanor remembered what his Curufin was like, his little raven. He needed his father, and Fëanor wasn’t there, but Celegorm would be. Was Celegorm making wagers with Curufin to get him to eat? Was Celebrimbor inventing projects to pull his father away from the pain with? 

Fëanor had to know how badly he’d failed Caranthir, and if he anger and bitterness twisted in the roots of him without Fëanor there to suck it all up like poison from a wound. Was Celegorm still looking out for his twins? Were his eyes still green as the depths of the forests he loved, or had they faded with grief and weariness and the burden Fëanor had shackled about his sons’ necks to a dreary slate? Had Maglor taken up composing again now Maedhros was home? Did he still forget to sleep some nights when the inspiration drove him out of bed? Had he found love and the children he longed for? Could Amras still laugh with all the joy of a sunrise or had it been smothered in the dark? And Amrod? Quiet Amrod who never seemed at home in his own body, what would happen to his restless boy if he didn’t have his brothers’ hands to drawn him home?

He had to know. He had to know if his sons, his boys, were still out there with their arms threaded together with the red of love, wings curled about each other shoulders, picking each other up when they stumbled. At least they were not alone. Let them never be alone, please, please.

Vairë’s hands pulled the last knot. Fëanor braced himself like a damn against a bank crumbling under the weight of floodtide. He would endure. He would endure. He would endu—

It hit him like a fist in the gut. She had not woven a tale of suffering this torment-of-the-loom, but a single moment, capturing the fall of a star crushed under the heel of a black mountain of a monster. Body, broken. Helm, smashed. Armor, rent. Star, fallen. Blood on those lips he’d never once kissed, smeared all over a cheekbone that had once been the perfect curve of the ocean meeting the shore and now was caved-in bone, crushed beauty. Hair a mess of gore and mud that had once begged Fëanor’s hands to sink themselves in to the wrist, all that dark beauty sinking into the bed of stars.

The world tilted, hazing out around the edges, there was only: the screech of a bird shot down, the roar of a forge-fire leaping up, feral and wounded to consume all, and the anguish of a head thrown back as the loss poured out like blood in a scream that quelled the hearts of gods. 

It was supposed to be the only thing he’s done right! He’d burned the ships. He’d _burned them_! He had broken Maedhros’ heart, but he had given him something to live for too because Fingon would be safe; they would all be safe. And one day Fëanor was going to bring Maedhros home to the arms of his beloved, and Fingolfin would be enthroned in Tirion –of course he would be, as if Fingolfin could be anything but a king—and he would lift his arrogant brow at Fëanor as he marched into the throne room with his sons at his side, and they would have been forever-changed and hauntings would shadow their eyes, but they would be alive and together, and coming like thunder and the smell of spring rain out the East. Of course Fingolfin would not smile and walk down from his throne to embrace them, but he would be there, alive, and so beautiful it hurt, and flawed and diminished from what he could have been with all those masks woven over his skin and games spun into game that Fëanor _hated_ , but he would be alive and crooking his brow at Fëanor, not the least impressed, but _alive_.

So what in Hells name was Fingolfin doing on the other side of the sea!

Fëanor’s memories of his years of madness were hazy, jagged things, only glimmering to clearness in moments with his sons when their love poured out all over him and pushed back the madness (he had never deserved them, but after what he had done…how could they bear to touch him? Hold him? Even look at him? Why hadn’t they walked away long ago?)

One of those glimmers cutting through the haze was his mouth on Maedhros,’ his lips promising to bring Fingon back to him (sorry, so sorry), then his hands cupping the Palantír, and being _broken_ by the horror of those visions. He remembered burning the ships because he had to save Fingolfin from lying sprawled in the mud with his ribs turned against himself and puncturing lungs as they splintered under the weight of a monster’s hate. 

He never had worked out why Fingolfin had followed him in the beginning. Was it vengeance for Father’s death burning a hole through his gut? He’d certainly wanted to be king badly enough, but he could have had that in Tirion. Was it because Fingon had set his heart on following Maedhros? Whatever the pull, Fëanor would have thought the burning of the ships enough to snap it. Why had he come to Endor? How had he even crossed the ocean without a fleet? Why had he done something so _stupid_?

Why did he have to die? Was it not enough Fëanor’s sons, his boys, were chained to an Oath (what had he _done_?), and would be here soon if they could find no way to break the strands of the Song? Must Fingolfin lay entombed in this prison as well?

A flash of memory: Fingolfin covered in blood, sword in hand, fierce as a lion, beautiful as heartbreak, stained in a sin not of his making. Kinslayer.

His scales. 

No.

Not this. Not a fate so cruel as this for the whitestar of their people. Not this for that little boy of wild hair and eyes for no one but Fëanor.

Like the voice of the shipwrecked, yet ringing with power despite its ragged desperation: /Are his scales balanced? Are they balanced!/

No response. The air around him whipping into a frenzy, twisted and sizzling with coal-red heat. He would have an answer to _this_. /Answer me, Námo! Are his scales balanced!”

Creeping from under the door, like a noxious gas, the grey fog came. It swirled up and took the form of the Vala. He loomed over Fëanor, who hung bound in chains but blazing up like a breast of bravery. 

The silence lasted so long Fëanor would have punched Námo’s face bloody if he’d been free. Finally Námo said, “Yes, they are balanced. He followed you. His crimes lay there,” Námo’s skeletal finger pointed at the dip, dip, dripping scales of Fëanor’s willingly chosen and never regretted punishment. (He did this for his sons. He did this for his people. He did this because what he had done was unforgiveable, but he would save them even if it meant extinguishing his very existence and he became nothing but dust between the stars. Anything, anything, for his sons. Take me instead!)

 _He followed you_.

That was not true. Fingolfin had never followed him a step in his life after he grew into a man that might as well have been a stranger, but if the Vala had mistakenly believed so and added Fingolfin’s crimes to his scales, Fëanor would not gainsay the falsehood. This torment should never come within a thousand leagues of the little boy who looked at Fëanor like he’d set the stars in the heavens.


	50. The Visionary, I

The Price of Vengeance  
Intermission: The Visionary, I

When she was a child she despised her body. It was perpetually clumsy with too-big bones, hands that could have made a blacksmith proud, and long-toed feet. Nerwen, they named her, man-maiden. She had been a gangly, awkward thing never fitting into her body and forever hunching her shoulders around other maidens as if that could make her mannish height and strong shoulders less noticeable.

She’d grown into herself. She would never be called willowy or delicate, but she was graceful as a giraffe is, a long-legged gazelle. She had the height of a man, the crown of her head pulling even with her father’s. 

But it was her strength of body she learned to love best. It was that which carried her over the Helcaraxë when other, delicate-as-birds females, had stumbled and fallen. It was her strength that allowed her to wield a sword and pull a bow. It was her strength that would make her queen because a delicate woman would never be able to lead the Noldor into battle against the Enemy’s forces, and in these dark times the Noldor would take none but a warrior as their ruler.

Ambition drove her out of Valinor, but love sustained her over the Helcaraxë. Love for her people, the glorious Noldor. Her mother was a Teleri, but she had never belonged to that race. She was as much a Noldo as her grandfather Finwë. She had their ambition, their pride, their bold, fearless spirits, their _hunger_. 

It was love for her people that drove her now. 

She had been regulated and corralled all her life on account of her sex. The cup of chance would have her numbered and forgotten among those whose only fault was not having been born with a cock.

Not her. Not Artanis. She was Galadriel, and she had always been more than herself.

She had led her people across the Ice beside Fingolfin and Fingon, only to be shuffled back into obscurity in Hithlum. She had sought to snap the binds holding her back when she came to Doriath, but all she’d done was isolate herself from those she loved. Yet she could not dwell among her own people when they refused to see her as anything more than a handsome face. Oh, she could manage her brothers’ households, parade herself before their people on one of her brothers’ arms; she could stitch banners for the men in a tower surrounded by a gaggle of other noble women, but she could not rule. 

It was said she loathed Fëanor, but the truth was: he had everything she so desperately yearned for, and he squandered it. He hid himself away in his forges instead of taking up the mantel of crown prince as was his birthright. He wasted his talents stirring up discord and debating the Valar’s right to rule over them, when he could have held every heart in the palm of his hand if he’d only set his mind to the collecting. 

Not until the very end had he become what he’d been born to be. Even cloaked in the veil of madness she’d followed him, even as she wished it was _her_ standing before the great people of the Noldor and firing their hearts with the power of her words, the strength of her spirit.

She followed Fëanor because she hungered. She wanted power, the power the men of her family had been born with. She held steady to her course even as her father turned back, but she had achieved none of her desires. 

But her rise was upon her. She would save the Noldor. She would bring them into glory and victory.

The escort waited outside her guest chamber to take her to the High King. She ran her hands down her stomach, the light silk of her dress feeling almost too constrictive for her fluttering heart. The time had come. The time to take her future into her own hands.

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and marched for the door. At the receiving table set next to it she had placed the wine. Her fingers curled around the jug’s slender neck, picking it up. Her _gift_ to the king. And Fingon would accept it and share a glass with her, because he trusted her. She felt no guilt at the thought. 

The escort led her through the high arched halls of Barad Eithel. It was not a place dedicated to beauty. It had been birthed for war, and had outlasted the Battle of Sudden Flame, though Morgoth had thrown his legions against it, because of the single-mindedness of Fingolfin’s purpose in its building: to endure.

She was taken to Fingon’s solar, not the Great Hall. There was no feast prepared, no reason to celebrate; it was just another day, and she had brought no company with her but herself. 

Aredhel Ar-Feiniel was not the only fearless daughter of Finwë. Galadriel had ridden alone from Doriath to Hithlum, a long sword that saw use upon her hip. This mission was her own, and as such she undertook it alone. Any warriors Thingol granted her would have been grudging. She lived in his lands, ate at his table, claimed distant blood, but they were not close. She was, in the end, more Noldo than Teler.

Fingon sat at table when she entered, the escort leaving her at the door. She had noted the lines in her cousin’s brow when he welcomed her yester-eve. Kingship did not agree with him. But she’d expected nothing else from Fingon the Whore, as he’d been secretly known in Tirion by those few he’d not charmed into falling half-in-love with him. The only reason Fingon’s rule had endured as long as it had was the snake whispering in his ear, the power behind the throne: Maedhros Fëanorion.

Galadriel’s hand tightened around the wine jug. Any thought of the Fëanorions always gave her strength in her venture. Fingon was nothing but Maedhros’ puppet, and Galadriel would rather Fingon’s wild bastard Guilin sit upon the High King’s throne than a Fëanorion.

“Cousin.” Fingon rose to greet her. They had never been close, but nor had they been enemies. His tired face slipped into a dazzling smile, the one that had made so many women weak at the knees. 

She slipped her hand into his, returning the smile. “Fingon, it is good to see you faring so well.”

Fingon raised an amused brow. “Don’t think to charm me, Cousin. It won’t work.”

“What’s this?” she teased as she took the seat he offered. “Have you become so jaded you’ve lost that legendary good humor of yours?”

Fingon snorted, slumping in a very un-king-like way into his chair. “It comes and it goes, and today,” he gestured to a mammoth pile of parchments he’d not stopped pursuing even to take his supper, “it goes.”

She glanced over the top missive as she served herself a piece of glazed dove breast. She recognized Maedhros’ handwriting immediately. She kept her face arranged in a polite mask. Her gaze slid to the wine she’d placed on the table beside her. But not yet, she wasn’t ready yet.

“So, what brings you out of your woods?” Fingon tossed his braids off his shoulders as he leaned back in his chair and played with the stem of his wine glass. 

The lamplight caught in the gold ribbons threaded through the braids. Long ago, when she’d been but a slip of a girl, she’d fancied herself in love with Fingon like all the rest. She’d put her sharp mind to work, and deftly maneuvered Fingon into letting her braid that glorious mane of his. She’d been able to sink her fingers into the waves and waves of ebony until they were lost, so thickly did it fall.

She shoved the past away. Tirion was so long ago it might as well have been another lifetime. “Perhaps I have been missing your company, dear Cousin.” She sent him a playful smirk.

Fingon barked a laugh. “I find that unlikely.” The humor wiped from his eyes to be replaced by weariness: “As much as I delight in your company, Galadriel, I’m too tired to play your games tonight. Come; tell me what it is you want.”

“What makes you think I want anything?” she parried with a raised brow, taking a delicate sip from her wine glass.

Fingon leaned even further back into his chair, neck stretching long and ached. He lifted a brow. “Don’t play games. I know you, Galadriel. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something.”

Galadriel set down her glass, wiping her mouth with the cloth napkin. “How do you find kingship?” 

He answered with more frankness then she’d expected. “There is little to enjoy.” He set his wine glass down with more force than necessary, his mouth pulled down as if he’d bitten into something sour. Their eyes clashed, and she wondered at the intensity of his gaze upon her. Surely he did not know of her secret longings to be queen, to sit where he now did upon the throne? “There is little freedom in being king, Galadriel.” She thought, almost, that he cautioned her against her path. But she shook the foreboding away; he could not know. “A king most often does not do what he wishes, but what he must. It is a lonely place: a throne.”

She hardened herself against his dooming words. Here was yet another male of her House who did not value what was his by birth. If Fingon could not appreciate the gift he’d been given, then what gave him the right to it?

With these thoughts bolstering her, she knew she was ready.

“Here,” she picked up the wine jug she’d brought and pouring a generous measure into his glass. “Enough solemnity for one day. Let us share a glass together and think of better times.”

He took the glass she offered him, but stared broodingly down into its red depths. “And of those lost to us.” With those words he tipped the glass back and gulped down the whole goblet-full. She did not even have to make a pretense of sipping her own wine. She watched his apple bob as he consumed the concoction. 

She wondered how long before it took effect. Her hands tightened in the material of her gown. No going back now.

The wine had been mixed in Doriath and infused with the juice of the fennel plant, as well as a hefty dose of magic since no plant could engender the amount of power she needed. A purely natural aphrodisiac would not have worked, though Fingon had never lacked a sexual drive. She needed an aphrodisiac that would blind him to all reason, all consequences.

She had not the skill or knowledge to make such a drink, but though Melian the Maia had, she could not share her plotting with the Maia. Melian would disapprove, and refuse to partake in Galadriel’s desperate plans. Her daughter, however, was not so scrupulous.

Lúthien Tinúviel was the embodiment of lust. Her magic wrapped around her like a shimmering mantel of heady musk. It throbbed red and slick in the minds around her, whispering in a husky voice as the scent of sex invaded the room with Lúthien’s entrance. More than just Daeron of Doriath had been enthralled. It was to Lúthien that Galadriel had taken her request. Lúthien’s eyes had gleamed at the challenge.

Fingon’s eyes glazed over. She forced herself to stay seated (don’t run, don’t run, you have to do this) when his eyes, more like a predator’s than a man’s, fixed on her. His nostrils were flared, eyes dilated as he fixated upon the only other breathing body in the room as a vehicle to sate the lust inflaming him.

He grabbed her, and she strangled a cry as he ripped her dress. His hands were tight as iron-brands about her arms, squeezing her waist. Her breathing came high and panicked as he yanked her skirt up, but she did not fight back or scream even though he panted like a beast in her ear, rutting against her in his desperation for release. She had to do this, she _had_ to.

He entered her dry passage and she bit down on her lip to keep the scream in. Her fingernails bit into the table, knuckles white. She had to endure. She had caused this, wanted this. She would live through this pain, the humiliation of his body slamming into hers and using her like a thing, a convenient hole.

She sent a silent thank you to Lúthien who had insisted Galadriel forsake her maidenhood before setting out on this path. Lúthien had known many men, she had informed Galadriel boldly without shame or care, and under the influence of the lust potion Galadriel’s loss of virginity would be brutal as rape.

Galadriel had had no man in mind. It would have to be discrete, as she was still a princess of the Noldor despite dwelling in the Sindar’s realm, and such looseness was not tolerated in Noldorin women. Aredhel had taken lovers, but Aredhel had not sought to be queen. 

Galadriel went to Lúthien with her dilemma. If anyone in Doriath knew the ways of getting secret lovers it would be Lúthien. Lúthien suggested something bizarre, yet intriguing. Lúthien’s body had shimmered, the secret place between her thighs growing, lengthening until a male’s genitalia hung there. When a face like a rose and lips like cream pressed into Galadriel’s, and the peaks of soft breasts brushed against hers even as a male’s cock hardened against her belly, she shivered with desire and surrendered to Lúthien’s talented mouth and hands.

Their coupling under was nothing like this brutal taking. Galadriel thanked Lúthien’s foresight that led Galadriel to knowing the touch of a lover before experiencing this thing she had engineered which seemed now the brother of rape. She prayed for it to end, for Fingon to finish already, and the grunting and thrusting to be done. But she never tried to pull away. 

She had looked into Melian’s silver bowl in Doriath and scried the future as the Maia had taught her. She’d seen the utter ruin of her people, bodies staked like hills with crows pecking out their eyes. She’d seen a great wave that seemed to reach the sky crash against the lands she’d learned to love. She’d seen Finrod, her beautiful, beloved brother, a bloody ruin in a place of darkness; his skin pulled tight over cheekbones so brittle they could cut the skin, a face as grey as ash, and eyes dull. She’d seen Finrod’s death, though she could not determine where or when no matter how many hours she sat hunched and red-eyed over the bowl.

She could not bear the thought of a future without Finrod in it, not after Angrod and Aegnor’s deaths. Not Finrod who trembling with life, vibrant as a pulsing star. She had feared it though, oh how long she had feared her brother’s falling! For he lived too recklessly, too completely. He burned with passions and the excitement of life, as if he were drunk upon it. 

She had known fear for him, but not like this, not like the certainly of this vision. She would do anything; endure anyone’s hands on her body, if it meant her brother could be saved.

Fingon could not save them. He did not have it in him to lead them to victory. He was nothing more than a face. It was Maedhros who all but ruled now, and Galadriel would never trust a Fëanorion with the fate of her people.

But the scrying bowl had shown her more; it had shown her Fingon’s coming death. It was close now, but upon its heels would come the destruction of the Noldor. The kinship would pass to Turgon in his hidden city. Turgon, who was more a memory now than an actual person, so long had he hidden behind his secret walls. Turgon would not save them. The Noldor would be as good as kingless if the crown passed to him. She could not allow this fate to befall them. 

When her mind crystallized upon this course, determined to wrest the kingship from Turgon’s coming grasp, another vision revealed itself to her. A child. A son with Aegnor’s hair, the deep gold of a sunset, and Fingon’s eyes and noble bones. Fingon’s son. And her heart told her, hers as well. Her path clarified before her, and became as clear as Fingon’s death in whips of flame.

She could wish she did not have to resort to the use of a child to claim the Noldor’s throne, but she could also wish that the crown of the Noldor would ever pass to a woman. She would be queen, but only in relation to men: a king’s wife, a child’s mother. What made this desperate plan possible was that the Noldor who’d followed Fingolfin and now followed his son did not hold to the old laws of Valinor that would have barred her from marrying her first-cousin.

Fingon would want to known his son, but Galadriel would not give him this privilege until he’d taken her for wife. The child would be the hostage against her ascension to queenship. First as wife, but after Fingon’s death she would be regent until her son grew into a man. She would show her people why she was fit to rule. They wouldn’t believe in her at first, but they would.

Fingon let out one last grunt and spilled his seed inside her. His body slumped heavily onto hers, trapping her against the table over which he’d taken her. But she was not concerned with that at the moment, all her focus was turned inward. Other women had lost control of their body’s cycles as the power the Quendi knew in the youth of their race waned, but not her. 

_Not her_. She gritted teeth as she clung to his seed, _forcing_ it to her will. 

She lay under him for long moments passing into hours as she wrestled with his seed, compelling it to take root within her. Fingon breathed softly against her back by the time she’d emerged victorious from her battle, the vigor of their coupling and the heavy drug knocking him out. His chest rose and fell like an easy sea.

She did not want to look upon his face. This was of her own making, and yet…and yet she could still feel his fingers digging into her hip bones, the viciousness of his cock pressing into her unaroused passage. His weight bore her down, but she was Nerwen, and no mere body’s weight would overcome her.

She left him there, slumped on the table. There were still many hours in the night, and she would have to be far from here before he woke. She’d pondered his reaction long, but while he would not know what motivated her, his pride at the least would be wounded by her actions, and Finwëion men were unpredictable when their pride was on the line –or perhaps they were at their most predictable.

She came alone, which made the leave taking all the quicker. She hurried to the room provided for her and gathered her few belongings before rushing to the stables. There were guards at the gates, but she told them she had received an urgent message and must be gone, though it be the middle of the night. She was kin to their king, and none gainsaid her.

She rode hard without stopping. The tiny spark of life in her womb was all she needed to keep her going though her body ached from Fingon’s use and her thighs wanted to close tight around her abused channel. If she could reach Doriath, than Fingon would not be able to touch her unless he wanted another Kinslaying. The Girdle would protect her. From its shelter she would send a missive to Fingon, telling him of his son growing within her and her demands. 

Dawn crested the Mountains of Shadow in the east on the third day of her flight, when she knew she’d failed. She was still in the heart of Fingon’s realm for she could not take the shorter route down the River Sirion after Sauron had sized Tol Sirion and turned it into a fell place of wolves and evil spirits. She’d ridden for the Gate of the Noldor in the west, and would have followed the sea’s shores south out of these northern mountainous regions to strike east again from there. 

She’d failed though. Riders came at her from the front and back, cutting off her flight. Fingon must have sent birds ahead to warn of her coming. 

He’d surprised her with the vigor of his pursuit. His pride had taken a blow, yes, but she was only one among hundreds of women he’d had. She had underestimated him. She had not thought he would be so dedicated to her capture.

She did not resist when they corralled her; the game was over and she’d lost. But she was still their king’s cousin, and earned the dignity of coming before Fingon without fetters. They brought her back to Fingon, seated high and proud upon his throne to cast judgment on her, but she walked into his throne room with her shoulders straight and her head high. 

Though she had been returned to Barad Eithel like a prisoner, the matter lying between Fingon and her was private, and he sent all others from the room before he rose to approach her.

She stood like a golden pillar in the middle of his hall, silently watching him. His boot falls echoed loudly in the empty chamber. His eyes were fierce, but he did not frighten her. She met his gaze head on. She was Nerwen, and she would not be cowed. 

“Do you know who I am?” If his voice had been a knife it would have cut her throat.

But she answered, her words ringing with pride: “I’ve known you since we were children. I am well acquainted with all your faults; you need not list them out to me.”

He growled, and suddenly his face shoved up into her space, far too close to her body for her liking. His eyes snapped like Dragon-fire, and now she did know a measure of fear as she looked upon a face that seemed transformed: both noble as Fingolfin and dangerous as any Fëanorion. “I am your _king_! I am High King of the Noldor, and you would think to trifle with me? You have overreached yourself, Daughter of Finarfin.”

Her nostrils flared, but she did not allow herself to waver. She wrestled with his gaze, unbowed. “You are also my cousin. And the Whore of Tirion.” 

Fingon smiled, but it was a smile that reminded her of a grinning wolf. “Tirion was a long time ago. You should not have forgotten what I am _now_. I think, _Cousin_ ,” the past endearment dripped mockery, “you’ve spent too many years hiding in your woods.”

Galadriel pressed her lips together, giving no answer to his baiting.

“You come here, to _my_ realm, and think to use me in some plot you’ve spun in the false security of Doriath? A spider should know its prey before weaving its web, lest it spin too greedily and ensnare a snack that becomes the feaster.” She glared at him. “So what webs have you been spinning, hmm? What did you think to achieve by drugging me and getting yourself fucked?”

She bent her face away from his which had pulled too close, the smell of his skin driving up the memory of that horrible coupling. She would not show him her fear. All was not lost. If she kept the secret of the child safe from him, she could—

And then his palm pressed against her belly, his other arm wrapping around her waist like a chain as she tried to push him away. He sought her womb; she could feel it, feel the touch of his _fëa_ against hers. 

She could not allow it! She struggled against him, twisting and striking until she’d gotten free. She stumbled away from him, her breath coming in pants both from exertion and panic. He could not know, he could not…

Her wild eyes sought his face and her hopes collapsed like a house of cards. He knew. He’d felt the child within her, if only for a moment.

“Why?” his voice folded with confusion as much as fury. “Why have you done this thing?”

She turned away from him, pressing a hand against her womb where the tinny life kindled. She was very tempted to hate him in that moment, but she considered herself a rational creature, and while she hated the Fëanorions, Fingon had done nothing to earn her hatred though he had overturned all of her plans. She had underestimated him, the fault lay with her. This man, staring at her with horror and distress, was not the one she remembered. He was a king now, and had done nothing but act like one.

“Tell me why you have done this?” he ordered again, because he could not see. He could not see the death stalking him, fast approaching. He could not see the ruin of their people when the crown passed to Turgon. He could not see Finrod’s dead eyes staring out of a silver bowl.

“No.” She would not tell him. It would serve no purpose, only that he would do everything in his power to ensure she never gained the power she _needed_.

The vulnerable, bewildered look fell from Fingon’s face as if it had been slapped off. In its place came the hard lines and sharp angles Galadriel recognized from her uncle Fingolfin’s face when he passed judgment. “Then you shall not leave Barad Eithel.”

Galadriel spun to meet the words. “You wouldn’t dare! I will be no prisoner!”

“You have earned such a fate,” he slammed back mercilessly.

“Finrod—”

“Will not risk war with his king. Not after I tell him of your crime.”

“No. You can’t.” The words were a denial, not a plea. Finrod could not know. Never.

“Then tell me what you planned?”

Galadriel snarled at him, trapped. But though it would kill her to lose Finrod’s respect, saving his life had to come first. She wanted nothing more than to fling her refusal to bow to Fingon’s demands back in his face, but the scales over-balanced against such a proud, reckless act.   
And perhaps she’d too hastily dismissed the suggestion of revealing some part of her motivations. He was more than she’d at first believed. He was king now, and she must consider his responses in this light. But she would not give Fingon everything; she would not tell him of his impending death, or how close the power would swing to her hand with him gone and a mere child inheriting the crown. 

She snapped out with teeth, hating the position of weakness he’d cornered her into: “I wanted to be queen. I carry your child in my womb, and I believed you would take me to wife if it was a choice between that and having no part in the child’s life.”

“That is a shockingly poorly thought out plan.” Fingon looked upon her with disgust. “I expected more from you.” 

She arched her neck, meeting the contempt. But she could not let pride be her undoing now. She forced herself to step closer to him, willing him to understand the fervor that drove her, and yet not willing to reveal herself completely. “Don’t you see, Fingon? We would be unbeatable together! With me by your side we could lead our people to victory!”

“You are a leach.” His voice sank like a row of fangs into her arm, tearing away the flesh. “Your greed for power will be your destruction, and I’ll have none of you.” Her chin rose like a shield against his words. She had done this for love, she reminded herself, for love. “The child I’ll be taking, but the mother Doriath is more than welcome to once I’ve gotten what’s mine.” He spun on his heel, taking up a ferocious pacing. “You shall be taken to the stronghold on Lake Mithrim.” Galadriel narrowed her eyes. She knew the place. There was a cluster of small islands at the lake’s eastern mouth upon which a safe-haven had been raised. “My wife will accompany you for her confinement. Given this will be my heir, despite our passionate love for each other that overcame our strength to wait for the marriage bed, we wish to take every precaution necessary.” Fingon had no wife. He raised a brow, following her line of thought leap for leap. “Not yet, but I will have one before the child is born. It will have a mother, and legitimacy. And the Noldor will have a queen, but it won’t be you.”

Galadriel took a threatening step towards him, but he didn’t even turn to meet her wrathful gaze. “I won’t let you steal my child!”

Fingon continued as if he’d not heard her. “When the child is born, you shall be free to return to Doriath. But take care,” he swung to her, blazing eyes clashing with hers. “I would not advise you ever setting foot in my lands again. And it will go ill with you if I hear even a whisper that this child is not of my wife’s body.”

“I won’t let you do this!” she vowed.

Fingon stalked over and grabbed her arms, shaking her roughly, but she did not cry out. “You have done this to yourself! It was not I who came to you and forced myself upon you! It was not I who plotted for power!” He cast her from him roughly, as if she were something dirty. “You have no choice. Either except this and leave the child willingly when the time comes, or become aquatinted with my dungeons. But you will have no part in my child’s life.”

“I swear by the gods, Galadriel,” he hissed, “if I die while the child is yet young, the kingship will pass to the Fëanorions before you ever get your claws in it! You think you can come here, force me to fuck you against my will, and try to blackmail me without consequences?” His face, which used to be so generous in its kindness, so full of vigor and laughter, now twisted in lines of viciousness as he spat: “You gambled your body for a crown, and you _lost_.”

“This from the Whore of Tirion who sired a bastard without even knowing it, so many women did he bed!” she snarled back, not wanting him to see how deeply his words cut her, how close she was to breaking. 

He laughed, but it was devoid of humor, the sound lodging like bitter ale at the back of her throat. “I can say it because I am a man. I will get myself a nobleman’s daughter for wife, and no one speaks a word against me, even as Aredhel’s choice to take lovers condemned her. Whore, I have been, and now I am king. And you, who had a reputation beyond reproach, will be judged by this one act. It is not fair. But have you grown so sundered from your people that you forgot the tomb we crawled out of? Did you think we had _really_ thrown off all the Valar’s chains? You cannot be that much of a fool.”   
His words hit her brutally, and all the more so because they were a truth she had long struggled against. It seemed now that all she had scarified was for nothing, because in the end she was powerless to fight against the grinding wheel of Noldorin society that rotated upon the axis of hierarchy, with men at its top and women the crushed bodies it buried in the mud beneath its relentless and pitiless turning.

And now she did hate him, to have reduced her to this. But she consoled herself with the knowledge that he would not long stand between her and her child. His death would find him swiftly, and then her son would be hers again. With these thoughts foremost in her mind, she bowed her head to him, as if accepting his decree.

*

The horse’s hooves clopped loudly across the bridge’s wooden planks. The sound of waves slapping against the piers, gently rocking the water-bridge, was a soothing melody in Fingon’s ears. 

The bridge to the Haven was only broad enough for one horse to pass at a time, and light enough to be burned in haste. Lake Mithrim was the Haven’s first defense against attack, but Orcs could pull oars. The wetlands that encircled the lake’s main island for miles on all sides were its best protection. A boat could not sail through a marsh, nor could iron-shod feet march over it.

The Haven Fingon had sent his wife and Galadriel to rose from the lake’s mists before him. Its walls carried the scorch of Dragon-fire upon their limestone faces. But the Haven had not fallen to the Enemy’s forces during the Battle of Sudden Flame despite the beating it had been dealt. 

Fingon urged his horse on, the bridge gently rocking under his passage. The wetlands were home to hundreds of white cranes that had flown North for their summer mating. The haunting cries of the cranes and the beating of many wings carried over the wetlands. The wetlands were nearly bare of trees, and the breeze brew off the lake, rustling through the coarse grasses and river weeds with a hollow, dry sound. 

As he neared the Haven’s walls, the fresh scent of re-birth filled his lungs; wildflowers poked out new buds and sleepy willows sprouted green growth. He took it for a good omen. Spring was the perfect time for a child’s birth. Though he knew Galadriel had probably spun a hundred schemes and would be frothing for vengeance, he felt only a joyous anticipation to be reunited with his newborn son.

He went first to his son and wife. 

The room he found them in boasted a fire even this late in the year, but chances could not be taken with the child’s health. Fuilmë’s face was lit like a sunrise as she cradled the child to her breast, her son now. 

She passed the little one into his arms, and Fingon kissed his son’s temple, curling his fingers in hair like old gold. It would have made the ruse easier if the child had been born with a Noldo’s dark hair, but looking upon his son’s beauty, he regretted the color not at all. 

His eyes rose to Fuilmë’s, and tilted her a smile. “He’s beautiful, is he not?”

“Yes, my king. He is perfect.” Her eyes were dark, and dominated the delicate bones of her face.

Fingon covered her hand with his. “If you did not know it before, Fuilmë, you have the full-measure of my gratitude. There is not a woman I would have wished to take for wife and be my son’s mother before you.”

Fuilmë’s smile folded with a hint of sorrow. “But you wanted no wife, and never will.”

Fingon frowned, eyes searching her face. “I have a husband, but you already knew this Fuilmë. Have I mislead you in some way? I believed I made myself as clear as I could when I asked you to be my wife and queen.”

“No, there was no deception.” She shook her head, the wisps of her dark hair escaping the net holding it up brushing against her cheeks. “Just a woman’s heart that would not be silenced.” She reached out and took the baby’s tinny hand in hers, the smile she lifted to him ran true and full now. “You asked this of me, to stand in the place of a wife, to be the mother of your child, and I agreed knowing it would be nothing more than a partnership of friends. I bound my hand to yours with the Ribbon of Joining, willingly, joyfully, for you had selected me above all other women to walk beside you in this, at the least.” 

“Fuilmë…” His voice dropped with sadness. He had not seen. She had hidden her love deep and well since she grew into womanhood. He’d thought it well and truly passed. “I did not mean to use you in this way. You came foremost to my thoughts as a wife, for I knew you would make a good queen, one who wore dignity like a mantel and carried compassion like a staff. I wanted such a woman as the mother of my son. But I would not have asked if I had known your heart. I wish to plant no bitterness within you.”

Her smile was undimmed. “There will be no bitterness for my love does not think of itself. To see you happy with Lord Maedhros does not stir dark thoughts in my heart. To see you happy is my greatest joy.”

Fingon raised her hand to his lips, kissing its back. He would strive to treat her with the respect and worth such a woman as her deserved, even if he could not love her back.

After he left Fuilmë, he went to Galadriel where she’d been shut up in a secure tower by his order after the birth. She was a slippery thing, and he would not risk her working some magic on the guards and slinking from his grasp. His son’s safety came first now. It was not so much the safety of limb he worried for, but the protection of his son’s innocence, his heart, from Galadriel’s schemes for power.

She rose to meet him as he entered. Her hair was a loose ripple of silver and golden light framing her. Her face was drawn, still wearied from the birth, but it was sharpened by an anger she could not entirely conceal. Fingon turned his mind away from the soul-wound he saw in her eyes. 

It was not a natural thing to part a woman from her child. And though he had given direction that she might visit the babe daily, it was not enough. He steeled himself to his course. She had brought this upon herself. Even if she loved the child, he could not risk her using it for her own gains.

“High King,” she greeted him coolly, her head stuck in that high curve of pride he did not think it could ever unbend from.

“Galadriel.” He could not find it in himself to call her cousin, not after what she’d done. The term spoke of intimacy, and he’d shared more of that than he’d ever wanted with her.

“Am I free to go now I’ve acted as your broodmare?” Her words were aimed to slice, to shame, but they slid off him harmlessly. If she had been a broodmare, then it was by her own making.

“A moment.” He took the seat opposite her by the cold hearth. 

The high windows had been thrown open, bringing the touch of spring into the room. It was a prison, but not a harsh one. The bed was soft, its covers rich; little things of amusement –books, gathered herbs, bits of half-written stanzas—lay strew about the room as if Galadriel had abruptly abandoned them all, no doubt stifled by boredom.

“Must I sign some oath never to seek him out as well?” her voice dripped scorn as she watched Fingon dig in the small sack he’d brought with him.

He didn’t reply, but pulled out a simple flask and two tin cups. “I thought we might end our business together as we began it.” 

He uncapped the flask and poured her a measure. She took the cup from him warily, but not as warily as she should have. Fingon had thought his own plan rather ironic, given it had been with a glass of wine this whole affair had started, and with a glass of wine it would be finished.

He poured himself a generous serving, watching her sniff the wine suspiciously from the corner of his eye. She would detect nothing with the skills of her nose, for the herb he’d slipped in was odorless, though common. Every healer kept a stock of it, a simple drug to dull the senses when the pain became too much. Galadriel would drink because, despite her treacherous nature, she trusted him to be honest in his dealings with her. She never had understood him, and now probably never would.

He raised his own cup to her. “To our son. May his life be long and may he know an abundance of joy.” He pressed the cup to his lips, tilting it back, feeling her eyes upon him. He took a mouthful of the drugged wine into his mouth, but when he swallowed it was a dry swallow.

Satisfied, she joined him in the toast. He watched her slender throat as she drank. She swallowed, but she could have employed the same trick as he. They stared at each other for a few silent moments before her eyes fluttered, struggling to focus on him, and her mouth slacked, the cup dropping from slack fingers.

He spit his mouthful of wine back into his cup before setting it down with unhurried movements as he watched Galadriel turn boneless in the chair opposite him. Then he rose and went to the door. A figure cloaked and hooded awaited him on its other side, and Fingon deftly stepped aside to let the other enter.

The hood was thrown back, and a mane of cooper hair revealed, shadowing the handsomest and most ruthless face a man had ever boasted. Even clad in a stained traveling cloak and his braided hair mused, Maedhros was so magnificent it hurt. 

From the folds of the cloak Maedhros pulled the Palantír, and approached Galadriel’s slumped form. They had planned this months ago, when Fingon had ridden to Himring shortly after his encounter with Galadriel, his heart heavy with fear and foreboding for his unborn son’s future.

Fingon had laid his fears down at Maedhros’ feet, seeking Maedhros’ council as he had ever done in Tirion, needing that beloved shoulder to lean against. He spilled it all out, Galadriel’s drug-induced use of him, the brutality of their coupling which had frightened him though he’d never let her see that, and his worry that Galadriel would find a way to continue meddling in the child’s life no matter how he tried to thwart her. 

Maedhros listened to it all in that silent, intense way of his, every word Fingon spoke of utmost importance to him. And then he said, slow as a newborn thought: “I might know something—someone who could help.”

Fingon followed Maedhros to Galadriel who stared at them through unfocused eyes. He waited as Maedhros gripped the stone firmly in his hand and awakened it with a thought, a name: Maeglin.

Fingon watched the Palantír’s surface stir like a heaving sea, before settling on something, a face, obscured to Fingon. “Here.” Maedhros’ eyes turned from the face he’d summoned back to Fingon. Maedhros placed Fingon’s hand over the Palantír before his own joined Fingon’s on the cold stone. The face snapped clear and sharp before him.

This was his first time seeing his nephew’s face, and he studied it intently, wonderingly. He could see Aredhel in the boy’s bones, but he had someone else’s dark eyes. He had that fierce beauty Fingon had always associated with Aredhel, like a distant night’s sky and the pale beauty of dawn. But there was a hardness in the boy Aredhel had never worn, like a sharpened blade carrying the dints and scratches of wear but also the dangerousness of a veteran sword.

/Are you ready? / Maedhros sent. Fingon heard the echo of the thought pulse through the skin of his hand upon the Palantír, their three minds linked.

/Place her hands upon the stone. I need the physical contact as a conduit. And her eyes. Lean her over the stone./ Maeglin instructed. 

It was an awkward placement with so many hands clutching the stone, and Fingon had to use one of his to keep Galadriel’s hair from swinging into her eyes and blocking them from Maeglin’s seeking ones. They crouched like that for long moments, until Fingon’s knees protested the hardness of the stone floor, but still they waited as Maeglin worked. Fingon could see the tight lines form on Maeglin’s face as the silence lengthened and Maeglin struggled with Galadriel’s mind. But though the task was obviously taking its toll upon him, Maeglin did not relent.

It had been Maedhros’ idea, and Fingon had jumped upon it thankfully, marveling that his own nephew might possess such Powers. Maedhros had not known for certain that Maeglin could do it, but nothing was gained if one did not attempt. Still, the invasion of a mind carried the potential for disaster. Fingon would have hesitated to approach Maeglin with the task if Maedhros had not been confident Maeglin was in no danger, such was the power of his mind.

Maedhros had asked Maeglin if he would look into another’s mind and wipe it of a memory, altering it until the events of the child’s birth and the months since Galadriel’s departure from Doriath were made anew in Galadriel’s mind so that the existence of the child and her relation to it was forgotten. It had only been a fragile hope that Maeglin could succeed, but he was willing to attempt it regardless. 

Finally Maeglin retreated from Galadriel’s mind with a weary sigh. Fingon could see from the tilt of his head that he was leaning against something, and his breathing had become labored. 

/Were you successful? Did you take the memories from her?/ Fingon’s fingers brushed with Maedhros’ upon the stone. 

Maedhros slipped the tips of their connecting fingers together. The simple touch caused Fingon’s heart to lurch in his chest and a smile to press into his mouth, eyes lifting to his beloved’s face. Maedhros had initiated the touch. 

/Give me moment,/ Maeglin gasped. After a pause to catch his breath: /Wait and see what she remembers when she awakens. I am not certain I was successful. Her mind is so strong. I have never faces its like./

/Yes, Galadriel has always been of strong mind, all the more reason for the drug,/ Fingon tried to reign in his impatience to discover if their plans were triumphant or not.

/Well, it is done. Whether it was done well or not is to be seen,/ Maeglin replied, but even Fingon, distracted as he was, could hear the disturbed note in his nephew’s voice.

Maedhros could too. /What is wrong?/

Maeglin’s eyes meet theirs in the Palantír, the distance of the stone doing nothing to veil the forcefulness of his gaze. /I agreed to this venture because you swore to me that it was needed to protect Fingon’s son. But I did not know it would be my mother’s cousin./

/Her blood does not change what she did./ Fingon threw back at the accusation he felt was rooted in the words. 

/I know what she did. I saw it. Do you know what _I_ did?/ 

Fingon answered, softly, /You did only as we asked of you./

Maeglin searched Fingon’s face, eyes keen, words piercing, /I manipulated her mind. I—it was a violation./

/If you saw what she did, then you must understand why this was necessary./ Fingon said, but he was disturbed Maeglin had spoken of what he had done to Galadriel’s mind in the terms of rape. 

/Yes, I know it was necessary. Her thoughts are too much like a Golodh’s for her to ever stop trying to take what she wants. And yet, she did not do this thing from a place of darkness in her heart./

/What do you mean?/ Maedhros stepped in, hand cupping the Palantír where it rested in his lap between the triangles of his criss-crossed legs.

/It was not done out of malicious intent, or even a hatred of the Fëanorions –though she has enough of that. She honesty thought she could save the Noldor. She believed she would make a better leader then…Fingon./ There was some hesitation before Maeglin gave Fingon’s name, as if he almost said another but pulled back at the last minute. 

Fingon’s mouth tightened. /And how is that? She has never ruled so much as a petty kingdom. She has never led men into battle, or faced the pressures of kingship, or had to make a choice for the good of her people when it meant sacrificing something she loved. She has no idea what she was asking for,/ he ended grimly.

/She might not have made a poor leader for your people,/ Maeglin replied quietly.

/What could she offer the Noldor that Fingon, who they trust and love with good reason, could not?/ Maedhros turned the argument back as skillfully as a flipped blade, putting Maeglin on the defensive. It didn’t matter that they were having a relatively civil disagreement, Maedhros played to win. If he entered a debate he was going to finish his opponent.

/She holds loathing for the Fëanorions, but she did not seek to utterly alienate you./ Maeglin spoke to Maedhros. /And regardless, the Fëanorions would fight because of their Oath, whether or not they loved the Noldor’s king or queen./

Maeglin fell silent, yet that could not be the end of it. Maedhros prompted: /And?/

/She believed she could bring Thingol out from behind Doriath’s enchantments and join the Noldor and Sindar in a great alliance, with the other Free Peoples as well. All the Quendi of Middle-earth united against Morgoth. She thought she could give us victory./

There was a moment of silence so tense it could have been cleaved with a blade.

Finally, softly, /Do you think she could have?/ Maedhros asked what they both wanted and dreaded to know. 

/No,/ Maeglin dropped into the coiled silence. /She could not have moved Thingol, and she is too much of a Golodh to have won the Free People’s allegiance./ But Maeglin loaded a last weight atop: /She dreamt the child’s mother-name: Gil-galad./


	51. The Visionary, II

The Price of Vengeance  
Intermission: The Visionary, II

Maeglin’s mind proved the stronger, and when the drug wore off they found Galadriel recalled nothing of how she came to be there. The memories had not been stolen, only buried so deeply in her physic that her conscious mind did not remember she had ever had a son. It was not a foolproof plan. A shock or trauma might one day recover the knowledge, and she would probably always be instinctively drawn to the child without understanding why. It was the best they had though, so it would have to suffice.

After Fingon had left Galadriel –who was under the impression she’d suffered a head wound while riding and had acquiesced when Fingon insisted she rest here for a few weeks to fully recover—he took Maedhros to see his son. 

The sun mosied down the western horizon, and the light shafting into the nursery was a burnished gold. A wetnurse cradled the child, his hungry mouth attached to her full breast. Fingon sensed Maedhros’ discomfort at walking in on such an intimate scene. His mouth twitched as Maedhros’ eyes flittered about the room, landing everywhere but the exposed female.

The wetnurse made no attempt to cover herself at their approach, perfectly at easy as she worked. They waited quietly while the child suckled until his eyes began to droop. When the feeding was over, the nurse handed the babe to his father and took her leave. Fingon only had eyes for his son. He walked closer to the west-facing window where the sky was lit with brilliance, gently rocking the child as he walked. 

He’d never gotten to hold Guilin when he was this young. At the time of Guilin’s birth he wouldn’t have known to mourn the loss of this precious experience. So much had changed. His priorities had shuffled so radically it was hard to identify with that careless _child_ he’d been back in Tirion. 

The setting sun caught in the wisps of the babe’s hair. It seemed like it poured itself onto the strands, but it was only reflecting the deep gold already there.

Maedhros came to look down over Fingon’s shoulder at the child slumbering in his arms. “Have you settled on a name?” 

His hand found Fingon’s waist, the touch almost thoughtless, natural as it once would not have been. In the handful of years since Fingolfin’s death, Maedhros and Fingon had spent more time in each other’s company than they had in the hundred years previous. Maedhros had set his mind on having this, on have _them_ , again, as they were in those all too brief months the Noldor traveled up the coast of Aman before the ship burning.

“Artanáro,” Fingon breathed, combing his fingers through his son’s hair. “Artanáro Gil-galad.”

Maedhros said nothing about him keeping Galadriel’s name for the child. It seemed right, somehow, despite Galadriel’s wrongs against him, to let her have this small piece of their son. Maedhros laid a gentle, but experienced finger on a little, chubby cheek, before tracing the curve of the babe’s nose, the soft wrinkles of his neck. 

“He is beautiful,” Maedhros’ breath caressed Fingon’s ear, and Fingon’s eyes fluttered shut, savoring. “Has Guilin departed Nargothrond yet?”

“Yes, he left the day I told him in the Palantír. Gwindor rides with him. They should be here in less than a fortnight.” 

“It is good to see he holds no ill-thoughts towards a half-brother.” They both thought of another set of half-brothers who had not been so fortunate.

“Guilin never wanted the throne. He shall begrudge his brother nothing. I shall make sure of it.”

“And Fuilmë? How has she taken to the child?” Maedhros’ voice carried not even a hint of resentment against Fingon’s new wife. Fuilmë helped more than hindered their relationship, for the marriage took the increasing pressure after Fingolfin’s death for Fingon to marry and produce a legitimate heir off his shoulders.

Maedhros and he had agreed with his taking a wife together, of course they had, Maedhros was his husband. It cut deep enough that Maedhros had felt the echo of Fingon’s sexual pleasure through the bond and had to endure that long, sleepless night before Fingon reached him in the Palantír believing Fingon had given himself to another. Inflicting that pain on his beloved was Galadriel’s worst crime in Fingon’s eyes, and for months after he had still smelt her on his skin, and awoken from nightmares of that brutality pumping through his veins and turning him into a monster that _took_ what it wanted from Maedhros.

“She looks upon the child as her own already. She cares not at all that he is not of her flesh, for she is determined to make him of her heart.”

“That is well.” Maedhros held out his arms in a silent request Fingon fulfilled without hesitation, slipping the small bundle of his son into the cradle of his beloved’s arms, waiting until Maedhros’ hand had a secure hold upon the newborn’s head before drawing his hands away.

Maedhros bent to kiss the sleeping child’s brow, before lowering the babe into the waiting cradle. It was a light thing, made of reeds and wicker, with little tinkling shells and bells hung from it that would jingle in a soft breeze.

Fingon watched Maedhros tuck his son in, drawing close, fingers crying out to keep Maedhros at his side, close, body pressed into body. Maedhros let Fingon slip his arms around his waist, hand falling to touch the back of Fingon’s. “Come with me,” Fingon drew Maedhros from the nursery and into his rooms just across the hall. Still holding Maedhros’ hand, he led him towards a pair of chairs before the hearth.

He poured wine as Maedhros lit the candle on a side table. The room was the kind a guest would be shown to, bare of personal possession. Fingon had only arrived at Lake Mithrim with the sun and brought little but himself. He preferred traveling light, and even in his chambers in Barad Eithel, he had not taken to cluttering it with anything but work he’d brought with him from his study, and, of course, his weapons. In this he had not changed from the Fingon of Tirion.

He made to take one of the chairs, but Maedhros took his hand and guided him down to sit on the fur spread before the unlit hearth. He smiled, passing Maedhros one of the wine glasses, and set about building a fire. Maedhros waited, watching him, and Fingon would turn little looks back, finding those eyes ever on him.

He sat back on his heels when the fire began eating greedily though the heavier tinder. He scooted back to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Maedhros. Maedhros settled his hand on the floor, leaning his weight on the shoulder beside Fingon until their shoulders touched. Fingon turned his face to meet his husband’s eyes. They did not speak, only looked, eyes dipping into beloved hollows and angles. 

Maedhros’ mouth lifted, not a full smile, but these almost smiles had become more frequent as their visits increased in frequencies. Fingon looked into Maedhros’ eyes and knew his life could end with him still tucked in the curves of his beloved’s smile. He never wanted to be unwrapped from it.

They spoke then for a time, about the past and the future. Maedhros told him: “The negotiations with the Edain Easterlings are going smoothly. I believe it won’t be long now before they swear allegiance to our cause. I would have liked to have added the Sindar and Green Elves to our ranks, but I have as yet been unsuccessful.” 

And Fingon told him of the strength of his own ties with the Men of Hador who were as determined to meet Morgoth in battle as their Noldor allies. Maedhros asked, crease pressed between his brows, if Fingon had heard anything definite from Finrod; would Nargothrond’s army be joining them? Finrod would neither commit nor outright deny his people’s participation, dancing around the issue with formidable skill (when he chose, Finrod could be frustratingly slippery). 

Fingon was Finrod’s king, but one wouldn’t know it by the way the people of Nargothrond and their own king behaved. Finrod knew Fingon couldn’t force him to do anything he didn’t want. Fingon would not bring an army down upon Nargothrond, and Finrod stood to lose no profitable trade agreements if he angered Fingon. It was Hithlum who depended upon Nargothrond for grain, not the other way around.

As they talked, Maedhros’ hand came up to play with Fingon’s braids. When one glass of wine turned into three, Maedhros guided Fingon’s head into his lap and started unbraiding the gold-threaded hair. Fingon did not ask if Maedhros needed assistance, his hands rose to join Maedhros’ one in the unraveling. Maedhros had passed well beyond the point of stubborn pride that would have had him unbraiding Fingon’s hair just to prove he was no cripple.

The last of the braids came free, and Maedhros’ hand sunk into Fingon’s loose hair, combing through it like he handled a newborn bud. Fingon closed his eyes and tilted his head into the touch. A year ago, Maedhros would not have taken Fingon’s head into his lap like this. A year ago, they would not have sat for hours sharing a hundred little touches.

Maedhros’ hand lifted from his hair to follow the curve of his ear. Fingon hardly dared to breathe. He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them Maedhros’ would pull away. The fingers climbed the height of his cheekbone, the shape of his brow, to come to rest soft as the touch of snow upon his mouth, tracing its curves.

He parted his lips, offering. Maedhros didn’t take the offer for a long moment, but then, slowly, his thumb slid between Fingon’s lips and into the wet heat within. Fingon’s tongue came up to meet the finger, tip touching tip. He could hear the sound of Maedhros’ breaths pulling in, a little faster than before. The heartbeat in the body under him beat a rhythm pulsing in his ears like maybe; maybe this night he would touch his beloved again with the completeness he longed for.

Maedhros’ thumb withdrew from his mouth, and he forced down the disappointment. This was further than they’d walked down this road since Angband. It was not a disappointment, but a victory. 

A mouth taking his shocked a gasp out of him. This kiss, this mouth, he would know by its taste alone out of a hundred-thousand others, out of all the other mouths in the world. This skin under his hands, this smell filling him, the sound of Maedhros’ breaths in his ear, he would know even if his eyes were struck blind. He would know Maedhros by the heartbeat in his chest. He would find him over all the leagues of a land of ice, find him in a nest of Darkness, find him in death and all the Ages of the world.

Maedhros’ mouth drew away, and Fingon’s lashes fluttered open to find his beloved’s eyes upon his face. He smiled, chest so tight he could have wept or laughed with pure happiness. Maedhros smiled back, not a shadow smile, but a true smile, the kind he’d once worn, long ago, before cruel hands stole it from him. Fingon looked into that smile and felt like he’d swallowed the heartbeat of the sun.

“Fingon.” Maedhros’ fingers came up to touch Fingon’s smile, “I want to try. Tonight. Now.”

Fingon’s eyes widened, “Are you sure?” They had moved no further than the removal of upper clothing in the bed, even this being a struggle. He had not seen Maedhros’ scars since the days of Maedhros’ physical recovery. Maedhros had kept them hidden under a layer of clothing that draped him like a funeral. 

“Yes, I am sure.”

Fingon cupped Maedhros’ cheek, “You must tell me the moment it becomes too much. Promise me.”

Maedhros’ fingers slipped into his hair again, stroking it. “Yes, I will tell you.”

“All right, then,” he said, but had no idea how to start now they’d agreed to attempt this.

Maedhros arched a brow, reading Fingon’s face like the back of his own hand. The look startled a laugh out of Fingon, “Yes, yes, I know.” He rolled his eyes, sitting up, leaving his husband’s arms with reluctance. He searched about the room with his eyes, before lighting on the oil lamp set on the hearth’s mantel. Its oil would do well enough as he had nothing better.

It only took a swift rise and swipe of his hand to fetch the lamp, before he sat before Maedhros again. He cast a glance over at the bed, “Would you like to…?”

Maedhros followed his gaze. “No. I want it to be here.” Their eyes met. Neither spoke for a long moment, before Maedhros said, voice a complex knot, “Will you undress for me, like you did, that first time?”

“I will do anything you would like of me,” he smiled, a hit of sadness tucked inside it as he pulled off his boots.

“Even remove my boots?”

His breath sucked in with a gasp at the teasing note in Maedhros’ voice. He had not heard such a light sound since… He swallowed. “Depends on what you will give me for it. And as I am the High King of the Noldor, you are going to have to think of something excellent because the world is at my fingertips,” he winked.

Maedhros gave him another smile. Fingon took it into his chest and horded it there, between his ribs. “I might be able to think of something.”

Fingon grinned and crawled over the fur to Maedhros, hands coming out to settle on Maedhros’ knees. “And what is that, my prince?” he began working on the buckles of Maedhros’ boots, taking his time with it, drawing it out with many flirtatious looks up.

“If you please me, I will tell you.”

Fingon’s smile turned sly. “Am I your boot-boy, then? How shall I serve you?”

The light fell off Maedhros’ mouth and a shadow took its place. Fingon cursed himself, “Maedhros, I—”

“No, do not apologize.”

The moment broken, Fingon’s hands stilled in their removal of Maedhros’ boots. He squeezed Maedhros’ knees gently. “Do you want me to stop? We can lie together on the bed.”

Maedhros’ jaw tightened. “No. I need to do this.”

“If you are not ready, then please, do not push yourself. Do nothing on my account. I would hold you, and just hold you, for all the years of our lives if that is what you need.”

Maedhros’ hand touched his cheek, fingers trembling. “You are so beautiful.”

He touched the back of Maedhros’ hand, sliding his hand over it to seal their skin together. “You are a thousand times more, heart of my heart.”

Maedhros’ eyes slid closed, taking in a deep breath, but not taking his hand from Fingon’s cheek. They opened on determination, “I want this. I will not let what _they_ did steal another moment I could share with you.”

“Maedhros—”

“No.” A chilly hardness etched itself into Maedhros’ eyes. “I was raped. Many times, in many different ways. But if Morgoth thinks I will be destroyed by a cock, than he is grossly mistaken.” 

This man, this man who Fingon loved so much he thought the love would burst from his chest with such fierceness it burned him up until the love and only the love remained. “Then let’s get these boots off you,” his mouth held all his love as he pulled the boots off, eyes never leaving Maedhros.’ 

With that task done, he stood, taking a step back so Maedhros’ could get a good look at him as he began to strip off his clothes. He debated drawing it, but decided against it. They could play those games another time; tonight they needed to spend it in each other’s arms for as many moments as they could grasp.

Maedhros watched him as he undress, his own hand unlacing his leggings and working them off his hips. Fingon knelt naked before Maedhros, and helped him slide the leggings down his thighs and calves, freeing his feet. His gaze lifted to Maedhros,’ asking permission to look upon him. He could hear the sound of Maedhros’ swallow breathing, the rapid beat of his heart that was not solely from anticipation, but Maedhros gave his permission with a nod.

Fingon’s eyes dropped to slide over the shapely calves, even Maedhros’ knees were beautifully formed, and up thighs that carried only a sparse clustering of scars. The scars centered on Maedhros’ inner thighs. Most of the scaring was collected on Maedhros’ back where almost every inch of skin was covered in the lashes of a whip; his belly, chest, and arms also bore the burns and surgically inflicted knife scars.

“May I touch you?”

Maedhros hesitated, before he held his hand out, palm up. Fingon laid his inside its valley, and let Maedhros guide it wherever he wanted it. Maedhros laid his hand down on his calf, just resting it there for a moment, accustoming himself to the touch, before slowly drawing it up, Fingon’s fingers molding themselves to the smooth skin under them. Maedhros took him around the underside of his knee to rest on the outer thigh.

“Thank you. You feel amazing,” he watched Maedhros’ face, checking to see if his words distressed. 

Maedhros had his eyes shut, and the smallest frown bending his brows, but he did not seem disturbed by Fingon’s words. “You may put your other hand on me.”

Slowly, he fit his second hand on Maedhros’ thigh, to mirror the first. “There, all right?”

Maedhros’ brows snapped together, “Stop asking me that every time you touch me. We will never get anywhere if you have to stop and ask for every move.”

Fingon laughed lowly. “All right, just tell me when you don’t like what I am doing, then?”

Maedhros’ eyes opened, face still not smoothed with peace, “That will do.”

Fingon smiled, and slid his hands up to the hem of Maedhros’ tunic. He met Maedhros’ eyes and began to pull it up. Maedhros’ hand flashed out and encircled Fingon’s wrist, stilling the movement. “Not yet.” Fingon searched Maedhros’ face. “I need to feel…I will kiss you first.”

Fingon’s mouth quirked as Maedhros’ closed the distance between their mouths, his own reaching back. He was not complaining about giving Maedhros complete control to set their pace, but Maedhros’ certainly didn’t shy away from ordering him around. That knowledge warmed him. It was how he remembered it being between them. He always fought Maedhros back for control, but Maedhros usually won, and he never minded.

The kiss started soft, but built quickly. Maedhros’ hand went to Fingon’s hair, mouth dragging over his in pants as he took Fingon’s chin and the line of his jaw into it. Fingon groaned, arms reaching up to gather Maedhros inside them. Maedhros’ breath came hot and fast against his skin as Fingon’s hands found his back, his hair, his neck.

Maedhros’ mouth sealed over his again, and Fingon opened to it. He shifted, wondering if it would be alright to lie back and take Maedhros’ weight upon him, but Maedhros surprised him by being the one to lean back, hands pulling him down on top of him. 

Fingon hesitated. He loved being inside Maedhros, but this seemed…not the wisest choice given Maedhros’ past. He pulled his mouth away to look down into Maedhros’ face. A keening sound dug up from Maedhros’ throat, his mouth trying to grab Fingon’s back. Fingon would not deny him if his husband wanted to kiss him. They went back to kissing, his hands gentle as his arms cradled Maedhros.

Maedhros’ legs spread, Fingon’s weight coming to settle between them, and he felt Maedhros’ hardness against his own. Fingon’s lips trailed kisses over Maedhros’ neck as his hands found the hem of Maedhros’ tunic again and pulled it. He had to pull away long enough to get the tunic over Maedhros’ head, but his lips did not want to leave Maedhros’ skin, so it took a few moments of building up kisses before he could break away long enough to hastily shove it up. It got caught on Maehdros’ elbows, the undershirt and tunic tangling up in a wad. 

“Leave it!” Maedhros’ mouth snatched his back. 

One of Fingon’s hands dropped to burry in Maedhros’ hair, the other so eager for the touch of Maedhros’ unveiled skin he followed the command against his better judgment. The tunic served too much like a restraint, keeping Maedhros’ arms pinned above his head. But if Maedhros’ did not seem to mind, he supposed it must be acceptable.

Maedhros’ thighs spread wider for him, bringing their groins together, and Fingon rolled down into Maedhros, gasping and drawing a gasp from Maedhros in return.

His hand fumbled for the oil, having to turn his head out of their kiss to find the damn lamp. He snatched it, and dipped his fingers into its belly, coating them. His eyes sought Maedhros’ again, but he’d shut them, mouth open and panting, lips bruised from their kisses. He was the most beautiful thing Fingon had ever seen.

He curled his hand around to rest between Maedhros’ legs, pausing before moving further, waiting for a flitch, anything to warn him away, but he found nothing. He eased his fingers inside, other hand petting the hair back from Maedhros’ sweaty brow. “You are so beautiful, my heart.” He slipped another finger in. “Is this all right? Tell me if you want me to stop.”

Maedhros’ eyes opened, the pupils dilated. Color sat high and stunning across his cheekbones. He didn’t speak as Fingon’s fingers moved inside him, only looked, but that look spoke with more power and syllables than any words.

When Fingon thought Maedhros ready for him, he slipped an arm under Maedhros’ waist, his other hand cupping the nape of Maedhros’ neck in a sweet embrace. “I love you.” Fingon dropped a light kiss on Maedhros’ mouth, not closing his eyes, wanting them open and falling inside of Maedhros’ for the rest of their lives.

As he pushed inside, Maedhros’ eyes fell closed, breaking that beautiful moment, and his face pinched, eyes moving under his lids as if he were caught in dreams. Fingon froze. “Do you want me to stop?” his voice shook, arm tightening around Maedhros’ waist. He would, if Maedhros needed it, but oh, his body cried out to push himself the rest of the way in, stop waiting and start taking. But Fingon’s heart was the master here, and he would never hurt his beloved.

He held absolutely still but for his thumb stroking the side of Maedhros’ neck. Maedhros opened his eyes, a crease between his brows that looked pleading. “Fingon, I need…”

Fingon let out a relieved sigh, mouth curving up. “Yes, and I shall give it to you, anything you want.” He began sliding in, deeper, mouth dropping open. He had to unwind his arm from Maedhros’ waist and fist a hand on the floor, holding up his shaking upper body as the pleasure surged through him. Had it ever felt this good?

“Fingon, I need, I need…”

“Oh gods, Maedhros,” his face dropped into Maedhros’ neck, inhaling his scent, his skin, his heat pressing into his. He pulled out and sunk back in again. “You feel so wonderful. You are perfect, perfect,” he kissed into Maedhros’ neck.

Maedhros tossed his head, arching up into the body taking him, “Please, please, I need you to…”

“Anything, anything,” Fingon began speeding up.

Maedhros made a little noise, almost a sob as Fingon touched that place inside him, “Yes, yes, fuck me!”

Fingon startled at the request. Maedhros had certainly never said any such thing in bed before. 

Maedhros’ arms strained against the tunic, and Fingon’s heart leapt into his throat, fearing the next sound out of Maedhros would be a cry, breaths speeding up with the sharp sting of what was not arousal. But finding himself restrained only seemed to drive Maedhros more wild, and not in a panicked way. “Yes, yes, take me! Your cock, your cock, yes!”

Fingon almost lost his rhythm. He didn’t know what to say to that, or if he should say anything, so he stayed silent and kept moving. The pleasure built again, his mouth worshiping Maedhros’ ear, when Maedhros’ shouted: “Please, I need it, I want it, please, master!”

Fingon’s thrusts stuttered to a halt. Maedhros’ eyes were squeezed tight, face creased with what seemed to be pleasure, but they flew open the minute Fingon froze above him. Desire clouded them, but the moment they locked on Fingon, other, more painful emotions took dominance. 

Maedhros turned his face away, into his raised arm. “Don’t look at me.”

“It is all right, it is all right, I…it does not matter.” A laugh that was nothing like a laugh tore from Maedhros’ throat. “Do you want me to stop?” 

It took everything in Fingon to make the offer and mean it. He burned to keep moving, to sink as deep as he could get inside the hot passage around him, but he would pull out of Maedhros and not touch him again if that was what Maedhros needed.

Maedhros didn’t look back at him as he said, “What I want I cannot ask for.”

“No, tell me, tell me what I can give you, anything, anything, my heart.”

Maedhros’ face turned back to him, mouth full of sorrow, “Oh my dear, what I want you cannot give me.”

Fingon’s hands came up to frame Maedhros’ face, fingers soft upon his beloved’s jaw. “I would give you anything, the world, Morgoth’s head on a platter. My will knows no limits when it comes to you. Point me at the mountain to conquer and I will conquer it.”

Maedhros’ mouth trembled, eyes lovely and full of sadness and shame. “I want you to fuck me like I am worthless, like I am your slave and...I want you to make me like it even if I beg you to stop.”

Fingon’s mind and heart rebelled against the very idea. But he had promised, and more, Maedhros didn’t just want this, he _needed_ it. 

Fingon licked his lips. “I will…I will try.”

Maedhros’ eyes darted over his face, “No, I cannot ask this of you.”

“You already have, and I have already agreed.”

“No, I—”

Fingon took a deep breath and clamped his hand over Maedhros’ mouth. Silver eyes widened. “Did I tell you you could question me?” 

He couldn’t bring himself to keep Maedhros’ mouth silenced. He didn’t think he could keep this up if Maedhros were to beg him to stop now. His hand slipped away, but Maedhros did not ask him to stop.

Slowly, he began to move again, eyes locked on Maedhros.’ Maedhros seemed to be waiting for him to make the first move. Fingon lifted his hands and pressed them into the creamy underside of Maedhros’ biceps, feeling the muscles and scars under his palm. He pushed Maedhros’ shoulders deeper into the fur. Maedhros’ nostrils flared, eyes darkening with desire.

“I am going to…” Fingon cursed the stumble, pressing on, “I am going to fuck you now.”

Maedhros’ dropped his eyes, “Yes, master, please fuck this slave.”

Fingon swallowed the lump in his throat. “I am going to fuck you,” he thrust up sharper than he had before, yanking a gasp out of Maedhros, “and you are going to enjoy it.”

Maedhros’ head rolled back, exposing his throat like a wolf would offer its neck to the one who mastered it. Fingon felt a spike of pleasure at the sight, and then sickness. He shouldn’t enjoy Maedhros like this. This wasn’t who Maedhros was; it was what his torment had made him lean to enjoy for his survival.

He lost his will to continue, faltering again. Maedhros’ mouth tightened, head starting to turn away again, eyelids shutting. He took this as Fingon’s rejection of him, of these strange needs grown in him.

One of Fingon’s hands plunged down to wrap around Maedhros’ length, squeezing with just enough pressure to show his power, “You are going to enjoy my—my cock in you, but you do not get to come until I say.”

Maedhros’ eyes snapped open, flaring up, body arching into Fingon’s hand, “Yes, master.”

Fingon didn’t know what else to say, so he focused on making his thrusts harder and faster than before. His hands gripped Maedhros’ hips, tearing their bodies apart but for the sole connecting points of his hands and his cock inside, though his heart longed to slot himself over Maedhros, mold them together and hold him sweetly.

“You like it like this?”

Maedhros moaned. “Oh, master, yes!”

“You what me to fuck you like this?”

“Please, yes, master! I want to scream!” 

Maedhros’ back bowed, hair a halo of copper around his head, gathering all the firelight and shinning like polished copper under sunlight. Fingon lifted Maedhros’ hips clear off the rug, balancing Maedhros’ lower body with just the strength of his hands.

The curve of Maedhros’ body, the color of his skin in the firelight, his face looking up at Fingon full of lust, yanked a growl out of Fingon. He panted, taking harder. He shouldn’t be enjoying this, but he was. 

“You are going to scream my name.”

“Yes, master!”

“Say my name!”

“Mast—”

His nails dug into Maedhros’ hips as he gave a powerful thrust that had Maedhros’ shoulders sliding back on the fur, a cry caught up from his throat.

“I told you,” he punctuated each word with a thrust, catching more of those cries out of Maedhros, “to say my _name_.”

“Fingon!”

He growled, pulled up from some deep, dark place inside him howling in pleasure at what he was doing, how he was using Maedhros. “Again! You say it as many times as I tell you to!”

“Fingon, Fingon, Fingon!”

He slammed Maedhros back into the floor, bending over him to grab a handful of copper curls, pulling Maedhros’ head back until his mouth parted and Fingon could attack it with his own. He had to pull back to breath, hips not pausing in their taking, the pleasure rolling up and up and up. His nails dug into Maedhros’ back, every thrust jerking little cries and begging words from Maedhros’ mouth. 

“Come for me. Now!”

A shock of fire rocked through him when Maedhros came from the command alone. He had not thought his mere words possessed that kind of power, but to find they did was exhilarating. 

He lost all control, hips slamming into Maedhros,’ gripping Maedhros’ body and using it for his pleasure as he stared down at those dazed eyes, that neck as limp as complete and utter surrender. Maedhros was so beautiful, and his, all his for the taking. Ecstasy like he had not known in such a very long time surged through him. It was coming; it was coming, ah, ah, ah! His mind spun out, body jerking, mouth dropping the center of his universe: “Maedhros!”

He collapsed onto Maedhros, gasping for breath. Nothing in his mind, everything washed blank as the mind of death, complete peace in that moment of nothing.

The moment ebbed away, and he came back to himself. The guilt wrung him. He pulled out of Maedhros with all gentleness, and removed himself from his beloved’s body, not lingering against his skin. He couldn’t look into Maedhros’ face. He’d enjoyed it. He’d _enjoyed_ it. He buried his face in his hands, blotting out the room, wishing he could blot out the memory of how good Maedhros had looked begging him like _they_ must have taught him to beg, beg and like it.

A hand wrapped around his wrist, drawing his hands back. Maedhros’ face met his eyes. He was so ashamed of himself. He closed his eyes, “I am sorry, I am so s—”

“Stop. You did exactly what I wanted you to.”

He took in a shuddering breath. “It was not…”

“Right?” Maedhros’ twisted voice brought his eyes open to see the memories haunting Maedhros’ eyes. “No, but it was them who did that, and you who helped me.”

“How can—that was not helping, that was me _enjoying_ —”

“Good.” The single words shut Fingon up. “If you had not liked it, it would have been me forcing something on you, and you giving it out of love, not enjoyment. Do you think I would want that?”

“No,” he whispered, “but I…it still feels…I don’t see how it could have helped.”

Maedhros looked away, the firelight throwing shadows from the weight of his hair curtaining his face. “It helped because I, we, shared this. Because I do not have to feel like I cannot talk about these…needs anymore.”

Fingon reached out, obeying the soft desire to hold Maedhros close, putting their skin back together like it should always be. “Then if it is what you need, it is what I will give you.”

Maedhros closed his eyes and pulled Fingon close, turning onto his back and taking Fingon with him to tuck Fingon’s face into the crook of his neck. “Would it make you more comfortable if I were the one who—I want…the control goes both ways, and to be the one in control might help me.”

“Yes, of course. I thought that would be what you wanted when we began.”

Maedhros voice came soft, “I would need to…I did not want you to misunderstand or be hurt, but I need to pretend…”

“You need me to be the slave and you the master?”

“Yes,” Maedhros breathed.

“You only had to ask. I told you I would give you anything, and this will be the easier to give. I did not like...I enjoyed it, and yet I did not _want_ to enjoy doing that to you. I think it would be easier if I knew for certain I was not hurting you.”

“Oh, beloved,” Maedhros kissed his temple, lips lingering long against his skin. “How have you waited so long for one as damaged as I?”

He sat up, coming to his elbow, hair tumbling over his shoulder to brush against Maedhros’ cheek. Maedhros’ eyes hurt to look into, but Fingon did not turn away. “I waited for my beloved. And I will continue to wait as long as it takes until he is whole again.”

Maedhros touched the corner of his jaw with his thumb, fingers curving about the shape of his ear. “My beloved.” 

Fingon’s hand came up to lay itself over Maedhros.’ “Yes, your beloved, who will be right here standing at you side when the world breaks apart because—”

“I am yours and you are mine.”

There came a night, in those years of bliss they forged for themselves in the middle of a war, when Maedhros kissed him as they spread their bodies out for the other, and the word ‘slave’ and ‘master’ did not fall between them. There came a night Maedhros made love to him as they had long ago on swan ships burned before the moon’s rising. There came a day Fingon teased Maedhros about something silly and inconsequential and Maedhros laughed. The sound of that laugh sent Fingon shooting into the stars. He hadn’t heard Maedhros laugh like that –a pure, clear sound, _clean_ — since before his torment.

They spent those years almost constantly at each other’s side. Strange as it was, for their duties should have pulled them apart more thoroughly than ever before, but they would not be pulled. Maedhros would spend months in Barad Eithel with him, and Fingon was so far passed caring what any wagging tongue had to say about it, he moved Maedhros permanently into his rooms. If his sworn-companions and wife wanted to spend their time protecting his reputation, that was their choice, but Fingon valued it as nothing next to the warmth of Maedhros’ body curled around his. 

Other months he would spend in Himring, getting teased mercilessly by Maglor in that smirking yet gentle way of his that included cleverly written songs about a fox and his lion lover which everyone ‘in the know’ saw right through. Maglor would sing in the Great Hall with Maedhros and Fingon at the High Table, mouth smirking and eyebrows teasing them with the sweeps of his lashes. Fingon would try to contain his amusement in his smile, but it would stretch until the laughter had to burst out. He’d spend the length of Maglor’s songs trying to smother it but being utterly unable to until Maedhros leaned into him and told him to stop giggling, eyes lit up like a uncovered lamp dwelt behind the silver, setting them dancing. And then Maehdros’ hand would start doing things to Fingon under the table where eyes couldn’t see, and Fingon had to smother something beside laughter. 

Maedhros enjoyed touching him in public far too much, eyebrow arching cooling as he answered one his lords, only his eyes giving away his delight as Fingon’s cheeks flushed and he struggled with his breathing. Fingon loved every minute of it. He treasured the way Maedhros’ mouth would curl, ever so slightly, as he teased Fingon into coming apart, the rest of his face holding perfectly straight. 

Morgoth had stolen Maedhros’ smiles, his laughter, this beautiful teasing he drove Fingon wild with when they’d first come together all those years ago, but Maedhros had stolen them back, Fingon’s hand linked with his beloved’s as they wrestled the pieces of Maedhros back.

Fingon would wake up every morning in his husband’s arms. They would make love, first thing every morning, before anything but each other’s skin, eyes, and the sunlight had touched them. He walked through his days so high on hope, love, and life, everyone around him believed with him that this coming battle would be the last. 

They would bring Morgoth down, somehow, someway. They would defeat him, because Fingon believed it so. He had walked across a nightmare of ice and into a nest of Darkness to pull his beloved up out of living death. They would walk into Angband as well and crush the one who had killed his father, and so many others, beneath their heels. How could they not? Maedhros and he walked together now; nothing could stand in their way.


	52. Chapter 42

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: chapter contains rape of underage character (15 y/o)

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 42

Celebrimbor marched to war with the Fëanorions. In secret, since he and his father had had some kind of falling out in Nargothrond, communicated lines between Celebrimbor and Maeglin had been rocky since Himlad fell and its great Palantír lost. Maeglin still snuck into Turgon’s Tower to use the Palantír, but while it showed him visions of Celebrimbor in Nargothrond, the comfort of mind-speak had been lost. Now only heavily encrypted messages Maeglin had to use every scrap of the woodcraft Breglos taught him to charm birds into carrying messages remained.

Breglos. Greif knifed him.

When the Great Eagle brought Fingolfin’s body (he never got to meet his grandfather. His mother had always promised…but he was dead now) it had also brought tidings of a battle Maeglin had not even been aware was raging. He’d broken into the Tower at the first opportunity and he saw: Himlad destroyed, strangulation, couldn’t breathe, heart, stopped—wait, Celebrimbor, there, alive, safe, breathe. Then, throwing the Palantír’s gaze wider, Nan Elmoth, burned, blackened, Breglos, where? Where? Where? Could not find. No where. Saw only dead, dead, dead earth, dead forest, dead Clan, dead family, dead family, dead family, dead everything, dead heart, dead heart, dead heart. 

Home was gone. That stubborn last flicker of hope that one day, _one day_ he would break free of this prison and go home, died on a blackened forest floor. 

Turgon did not have to fear he’d make a break for it now the jaws of the Hidden Way had spit out Gondolin’s army years and years too late. The closest thing to home Maeglin had left was back behind those mountain walls in a courtyard garden spread with blankets colorful as wild flowers and each one holding what was left of family. No, not quite. There was Celebrimbor too, out here behind the walls (and the shadow of a toy knight a child’s hand had painted golden braids into hair black as his own), but he could not leave his people trapped in hell to grasp his own freedom.

But maybe, maybe he didn’t have to. Was not Fingon king? And that day Celebrimbor had spoken of, the dawn’s rising, come at last? Was not justice and freedom at hand? 

Fingon may not be Fingolfin, but he would _do_ something, wouldn’t he? He was Noldo like Celebrimbor, not Golodh like the Gondolindrim. That was what Celebrimbor had told him and his mother long before, when he used to fight Giant Spiders and evil Orc packs at his uncle’s side, ridding out to save the world, the two of them, shinning heroes.

Maeglin had not been included in Turgon’s party when Turgon road up from the Fen of Serech where Gondolin’s army camped to meet Fingon’s where it hid, concealed in the east side of the mountains. Turgon hadn’t bothered inventing an excuse for leaving Maeglin behind, Maeglin wasn’t worth one. 

Turgon had seen to it that Maeglin had no battalion of his own to hold him here with duty, for the House of the Wolf had not been included in Gondolin’s army. Maeglin had been assigned a place in Turgon’s Guard, and had no responsibilities but guarding the King’s back. There was nothing to keep Maeglin pinned down to this encampment of Golodhrim, so he followed after Turgon’s party, riding north. 

Turgon would be furious at the disobedience, but Maeglin was going to meet his uncle Fingon. Turgon could throw all the ice-cold tantrums he liked. The dawn was rising, and its coming would sweep through Gondolin like a tidal wave, breaking chains and washing all lions out to sea.

The kings and captains were at war council. They’d gathered around a large field table set up with only the sky for a roof. Trees swayed overheard, tents clumped through the forest and rocky land of the mountain side, zigzagging around the terrain, no neat rows boxed by company here like in the flat plains at the River Sirion’s mouth where Gondolin’s army had pitched its tents.

Maeglin took his time observing from his perch in a tree. His uncle wore slender gold ribbons braided through his black hair, just like in all his mother’s stories. He had a generous smile that flashed, dazzling, but sometimes curled in the tuck of his mouth with his eyes crinkled up at the corners. When he was not smiling, his face was noble and fair, but kind, always kind, exactly as Maeglin used to imagine it when his Fingon and Maeglin knight went ridding out on adventures together.

There was nothing of Turgon in Fingon’s face. They were polar opposites in every way. Maeglin saw Turgon seated at the war council, face remote, unsmiling, and unkind as ever. Turgon’s lords and captains were there as well, polluting the Noldor with their Golodhrim presence. Glorfindel was even sat at Fingon’s right-hand, and Fingon would turn to look at the Golodh, as if Glorfindel would ever be someone worthy of Fingon’s smile.

Doubt crept into Maeglin’s heart. Hadn’t Celebrimbor said he’d told Fingolfin in the Palantír of the Golodhrim’s evil? Did Fingon not know, or did he not believe, or did he…not care?

Maeglin could not wait. He had to know before despair and bitterness strangled the hope Celebrimbor had tended and watered with his wholesomeness. Celebrimbor’s noble heart had showed Maeglin there were Noldor out there who slipped out of his mother’s tales and into life without the reek of corpses.

Maeglin climbed down from his perch and approached the war council. Guards halted him as he stepped into the small clearing, but their challenge, demanding to know his identity and purpose, drew attention. Turgon’s face darkened, but it was Fingon’s Maeglin cared for.

Fingon met his eyes and a smile like the warmth missing from a dreary day lit up his face. “Maeglin!” He left his war council to come striding across the grass to Maeglin. He’d recognized Maeglin from their single, brief encounter through the distance of a Palantír, but that smile on his face was too bright for a stranger through a Seeing Stone. It was an uncle’s for his nephew, for family.

Fingon pulled him into his arms without hesitation. Maeglin embraced him back, closing his eyes, breathing in the scent of sun-warmed hair and a cinnamony male scent underneath. Maeglin wished his armor vanished from his body so he could discover the exact shape of his uncle’s hugs.

Fingon took Maeglin’s face in his hands, and kissed both his cheeks. “Wondrous day is this that I meet my nephew at long last!” Maeglin’s throat tightened around tears. 

Fingon’s eyes, blue as clear river-water, ran over his face, looking long and deep. His thumbs caressed Maeglin’s cheeks, just under the curve of bone. Then he said, breath like a building summer storm, the scent of the turning of the tide, “We will talk of Gondolin once this is all over. I will deal with Turgon, and when I am through, there will be no Gondolin left, no Hidden Cities doubling as prison cells. I will take care of everything, all right?”

And Maeglin believed him, such was the light knit into Fingon’s skin and the way his words rolled off his tongue with confidence and the authority of a king. Fingon would take care of everything. He was kind and just and noble. He was a Noldo walked clean and pure and bathed in a glory of light from his mother’s tales. Fingon had the strength of heart and power to make everything right. He was not just a man with two hands who could only save so many, only do so much, Fingon was a king with a kingdom behind him and host of allies at his side. He would take Turgon into his fist and shake him to dust with justice.

Fingon slung an arm over Maeglin’s shoulders like they were already brothers-in-arms, and led him back to the war council. He set him on his left, as if he did not want to be parted from him even by the length of the table. The council picked up again, and Maeglin was too busy soaking up his uncle to notice the daggers in Turgon and the Golodhrim’s eyes to see him, the scum on the bottom of their boots, seated higher than Turgon in Fingon’s regard. The only blight upon that afternoon at his uncle’s side was that Fingon kept looking to his right, leaning over to whisper in Glorfindel’s ear, paying more attention to Glorfindel than anyone else at the table.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t bear to share his uncle’s regard; it was that Fingon lavished it on a Golodh. Did he not know what kind of man Glorfindel was? But Fingon must have known Glorfindel in Valinor; they were cousin after all. Maybe, once, Glorfindel had been an honorable man, and Fingon did not know that that man had turned into a Golodh who lived a life of luxury and ease on the backs of Wood-elf slaves and took want he wanted.

When the war council broke up, Maeglin stood back, waiting for Fingon to detangle himself from the captains and lords seeking one last word with their king. Maeglin kept one eye on Fingon, ready to follow him, and one on Turgon to keep himself out of Turgon’s path. He would deal with Turgon later, but not on this day smelling sweet as a summer storm, rushing in with the turn of the tide.

But when Fingon finally broke away, an unwanted parasite clung after him: Glorfindel. Maeglin’s jaw tightened. Fingon had his arm looped over Glorfindel’s shoulders like he’d done with Maeglin, like it was nothing special, like anyone could tuck under his arm. 

Fingon smiled at Glorfindel, and they spoke in hushed tones to each other, a pocket of intimacy that Maeglin had no place inside. His absence was not even noticed. Fingon did not crane his head back in search for him. Maeglin had been forgotten for a Golodh.

Maeglin followed them at a distance back to Fingon’s tent where the two of them slipped inside, the flap shutting behind them. Maeglin stared at that shut flap a long time. He used to have these stories he’d make up in his head when he was young and lonely, and Fingon featured in all of them. Maeglin had latched onto Fingon as the most interesting and shinning figure in his mother’s tales. 

When Maeglin had to creep around his mother’s room, silent as a mouse while she was resting, Fingon would creep at his side. They were sneaking up on an Orc-pack. When he was naughty and slipped outside to play, Fingon and he would have grand adventures climbing trees, scouting the land, and scaling the cliffs of the Thangorodrim to save their cousin Maedhros from the evil Dark Lord. Before his father made him his Finwë knight, Fingon would ride in the crook of his arm, his favorite forever. He’d take him outside with him even though he was sad to get his Fingon dirty, but it was so much funner to play with Fingon in the forest, hiding under fallen logs, creeping like rabbits through the grass, leading grand armies through the treacherous waters of Maeglin’s stream.

Maeglin wasn’t a child anymore. How could his throat burn, and his chest hollow over something so _insignificant_? He had lived through all this grief and suffering, heart choked bitter with thorns and a dagger plunged in, learning to breathe through this _pain_ , and he felt like crying because a man he’d never met before today didn’t remember him?

He turned away. He should find Thala and ride back south to the Gondolin encampment. They had a war to fight. But his feet didn’t have the strength to take him back there, to sink into the muck of that place, a coffin of Golodhrim closing in around him. He would go back to Gondolin to get his people out of there, but that did not mean he had to fight this war side-by-side with those animals.

He found a tree that offered him a clear line of sight to Fingon’s tent entrance and climbed. He straddled a branch, back cradled against the trunk, and settled in to wait. Glorfindel couldn’t stay in there monopolizing Fingon forever.

Only it seemed he could, because the night drank the sunlight from the sky and Glorfindel still hadn’t left. But he’d have to leave with the dawn. Turgon would ride back south, and Glorfindel had his House to lead into battle. When he was gone, Maeglin would still be here.

Maeglin leaned his head back, looking up at the stars winking through the leaves. He clung to the scent of a summer storm, the turning of the tide. Soon. It would be over soon. His people would be free, and Maeglin… 

Sometimes in the hushed voices of speaking of the divine, or the forbidden, Maeglin and Nídon would ask each other what they would do if they were free. Nídon said, without a shred of hesitation, that he would strike East, over the mountains. Many of the Wood-elves would follow that path. But Maeglin? Would he go East too? He’d promised Celebrimbor he would find him when all this was over, and though a part of him would go East with his people, the rest of him would take him back to Celebrimbor, at least for a time. He was more Maeglin Starchild than Lómion Finwëion. The forests and Free People would always be home.

He fell asleep under the stars, and woke with dawn’s breaking. He waited until Glorfindel took his stench from Fingon’s side before approaching Fingon’s tent. The guards at the entrance did not know him, but his voice carried through the tent’s tarp as he named himself, and Fingon threw the flap open to pull him inside with an embrace. 

When Maeglin told him he hadn’t left with Turgon’s party because he would not fight this battle in Turgon’s Guard, Fingon said he was welcome in his own, if Maeglin wished it. Maeglin wished it, very much. That night it was not Glorfindel here on Fingon’s side of the tent flap, but Maeglin. It was Maeglin Fingon slung his arm about, Maeglin who Fingon turned to whisper into the ear of, Maeglin who Fingon asked if he wanted his own tent, or he could share with Fingon, if he wished. Maeglin wished, very much.

That night, the last before the battle launched, Maeglin learned his uncle was one of those people who took up a whole bed when they slept, arms thrown out, body contorting, but the moment they sensed another body beside them in the bed, turned over to cuddle. Maeglin smiled sleepily, stirred from slumber when his uncle rolled up against his back, and started hugging him like a child’s toy pressed against his chest. Fingon nuzzled into his neck, and mumbled in his sleep. Maeglin caught the first syllables of Maedhros’ name. 

*

Night after the 6th day of Nirnaeth Arnoediad

The sky rolled black with the poisonous vapors belching from Thangorodrim and slamming into the clear southern sky. It was as if Darkness and Light battled in the heavens even as they battled on Endor’s crust. The rain had drenched the field, putting out the Dragon-fires still burning over the land and feeding on the corpses of the fallen. 

Maeglin mourned that this rain had not come during the hours of battle when it could have eased some of Glaurung’s terror in the hearts of the Elves, Men, and Khazâd of the Union, and made the Dragon’s fire less devastating. The battle had been waging for almost a full week now, and the losses staggered. The host of Fingon had pushed up to the very walls of Angband, but had been driven back. That was two days ago. 

Turgon and Fingon’s forces, as well as the Men of Hithlum, had been flagging, and perhaps would have lost the field this day if the Fëanorion host had not finally come up from the east. The sound of their clear trumpets splitting the sky had lit panic in the minds of the Orcs like a forest fire. Night had fallen however, and the Fëanorions had not been able to cleave their way to their allies on the western side of the plain. 

Yet even Orcs must rest after six days of continuous fighting. A heavy guard had been set, and the armies of the Union set up their three separate camps to lay their exhausted bodies down. For the host of Fingon this was the first night of rest they had known since being driven back from the walls. The Mortals amongst them had used up the last reserves of their strength. Maeglin did not trust in Morgoth or the Orcs’ honor which had granted both sides this night of reprieve, but he did trust in the reality that Orcish bodies were no more indomitable than Elvish ones. With the rising of a sun that would not pierce the sky’s darkness, the fighting would renew. 

Maeglin had finished washing all the mud and day’s old grime from his skin. Once his hair was cleaned of filth, he too would collapse into bed as most of the camp already had. Fingon was out in the rain still, running over the armies’ readiness to be back up on its feet if the night watch sounded the trumpets declaring Morgoth had broken the temporary truce. Fingon had already ensured the army would not be left vulnerable and taken by surprise, but he’d gone back out after they’d finished a simple meal of lembas and miruvor to bolster their strength. His mind would have found no peace in he had not. 

Maeglin had his head dunked in a water basin fast on its way to losing its heat, when the guards at the tent entrance called out, “Celegorm Fëanorion seeking King Fingon.”

Maeglin froze. What was…had Celegorm crossed the Dragon-fire scorched land between the Fëanorion and Fingon’s armies? While Morgoth’s army rested as well, that did not mean the ride had not been fraught with peril. And now Celegorm Fëanorion stood on the tent flap’s other side. Celegorm Fëanorion, his mother’s favorite cousin and old lover, and the uncle featured in many of Celebrimbor’s tales.

“My lord, shall I send him in?”

“Yes, come in!” Only after the words fell from Maeglin’s mouth did he recall his state of dress, or rather undress. He stood in the middle of the tent without a stitch of clothing on, and his hair a dripping tangle around him, only half rinsed. When he’d imagined meeting Celegorm Fëanorion, it was not in his skin.

He made a grab for the clean leggings he’s laid out, and turned his back to the entrance as he saw the flap pulling aside and a boot stepping through. “A moment,” he said as he pulled his leggings up, wet skin sticking them. But finally they mounted his hips, and he laced them up.

He turned, shoving the heavy weight of his thick, wet hair off his face. Celegorm had eyes of an endless green. They were a few shades darker than Breglos’, and yet brighter, for they possessed the Tree Light. 

Those eyes looked him over now, inspecting him from head to toe. A slow smile curled in the corner of Celegorm’s mouth, a sly, secret one, yet not secret at all from the way he looked at Maeglin when their eyes met. Celegorm Fëanorion liked what he saw and wanted to wander into Maeglin’s bed.

Maeglin took his time looking Celegorm over in return. He wore full armor of excellent quality, bearing the crest of Fëanor’s House. Not the crests worn by its soldiers, but the one marking him as a son of the Spirit of Fire. His hair hung unbound, hood thrown back to let it tumble in loose waves of pale gold threaded through with glints of silver. There was no denying he was strikingly handsome; his sharp features declared his Noldo blood strongly.

Noldo, not Golodh. He wasn’t like _them_. Even though there were Wood-elves laboring under Noldor on Fëanorions’ lands, and Maeglin’s teeth set at the ugly acts he knew were sliding by in the sewers of the land, Celebrimbor wasn’t a Golodh. He swore his family was not either. There were Golodhrim out here beyond Gondolin’s walls, but most, Celebrimbor promised him, were Noldor.

Maeglin finished his perusal, and returned to business. Celegorm was fine indeed, but Maeglin wanted to collapse bonelessly into his bed tonight. “Fingon should be back in an hour or two. Can you wait, or can your return journey not be delayed?” 

“I can wait.” 

Maeglin waved a hand at the lembas and miruvor still left out from Fingon and his supper, “Help yourself.” 

He saw Celegorm move and pour himself a cup of the miruvor out of the corner of his eye while he bent and picked up his discarded clothing. He dropped it into one dirty pile, and ran his hand through his hair. Soapsuds still collected like pearls inside it.

He turned a look over the line of his shoulder back at Celegorm, and found Celegorm watching him from over the rim of his cup as he sipped. Celegorm’s eyes glittered in the lamp light. There was no mistaking the desire there as they trailed over Maeglin at their leisure. 

Celegorm displayed the Fëanorion army’s freshness. The Fëanorions had fought but a day before the Orcs of Morgoth parlayed for the reprieve, quailing before the Fëanorions’ bright eyes and sharp swords. If it had not been for the western hosts’ exhaustion, the Fëanorions would yet be fighting.

Celegorm set the cup down and moved towards him. He had a prowling, hunter’s walk, soft-stepping but intent in every bootfall. He flicked the buckles off his armguards as he came. “You should finish rinsing.” 

Maeglin made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat, but turned around, and gathered up his hair to drop back into the basin. He heard Celegorm slowly shed his armor behind him as he bent and lowered his head. The water had cooled. He picked up the rinsing cup and started pouring water through his hair.

When Celegorm came up behind him, he felt the heat of his body. Celegorm stood close enough to wash Maeglin in his scent: the smell of forests and untamed lands, leather, and a spicy male musk at its base. Celegorm took Maeglin’s hips between his hands and curved his chest over Maeglin’s back to whisper in his ear, “Let me help you with that.” 

He slid his fingers over Maeglin’s. Maeglin let him take the cup, and did not stop him when rinsing curled into fingers lingered on the fine hairs on his nape, or one finger trailing down the road of his spine, pausing to trace the Cirth. Maeglin couldn’t deny it felt heady to be desired by Celegorm Fëanorion, but what kept him from brushing Celegorm’s touch away was its honest lust without falling into the lecherous. 

Maeglin had received looks of lust in Gondolin from Golodh, but they all ran over his body leaving a film of scum. Celegorm looked him at him like Breglos used to look at him: lust without the under layer of lion scent. Celegorm did not look at him like Maeglin was his right and should be honored one as lowly as he had received Celegorm’s notice. He did not look at him like he would take what he wanted whether Maeglin said yes or no.

Celegorm sunk his hand into Maeglin’s hair, nails lighting scratching his scale. “I have always found battle to bear a likeness to the hunt,” his voice curled around Maeglin, purring and suggestive. He bent even lower over Maeglin, chest pressing flush against his back, the evidence of his desire grazing Maeglin’s ass. The shape of his lips brushed the shell of Maeglin’s ear, “I have always found myself very _hungry_ after a good bloodletting.” 

Maeglin’s body dragged with exhaustion. If the offer had come on another day, he would have wandered into this man’s bed. As it was, he pushed back against Celegorm’s chest, singling he wanted to stand. Celegorm let him up, not holding him pinned down. Maeglin wrung his hair out over the basin, and said, “Maybe if we meet after the battle is over we can see about sating that hunger, but for now I am tired.” 

“Fair enough,” Celegorm stepped back, casting a glance around the tent as Maeglin picked up a towel and start rubbing the dripping moisture from his hair. “Tell me your name so I do not have to hunt down all Fingon’s…what position do you hold?”

Maeglin blinked. He hadn’t realized… “I am Maeglin. Aredhel’s son.” 

Celegorm’s head whipped back around, face blanching. “Aredhel? That cannot…” Celegorm searched his face wildly, and must have found the stark resemblance now between mother and son. “You…” Celegorm’s voice sounded strangled. “You are her boy.” 

Then his gaze honed in, the wildness of its searching and shock, cut away, leaving an intensity of lust and _hunger_ that curled heat into Maeglin’s belly and hardened him when Celegorm closed the distance between them with in a stalk. Maeglin was what he hunted, what he wanted so ravenously the _want_ poured off his skin, scenting the air with desire. 

Maeglin swallowed, but did not step back or knock Celegorm’s hand away when it lifted to his face. Celegorm’s other hand captured Maeglin’s neck, pulling their bodies together. The hunger on his face drew Maeglin in, exhaustion forgotten. The exhaustion peeled off his bones, leaving only the aching desire to be kissed by a mouth that wanted him so badly it trembled. 

Celegorm’s mouth took his in a kiss of heat and moans. Hands yanked him closer, grabbing his waist, clenching on his hipbones, and Celegorm breathed into his mouth, “ _Hells_ ,” and, “ _Fuck_ ,” and, “Let me inside you, you fucking beautiful…fuck—” Celegorm grabbed Maeglin’s thighs, lifting him off his feet, wrapping his legs around his waist, and carried him into the back for the tent where the furs waited.

Celegorm tossed him down on them, and started yanking off his tunic and boots. Maeglin stripped his own leggings off, and rooted around for something to ease the way, settling on the healing balm Fingon had tended the light wounds on his body with earlier. But when Celegorm dropped into the furs and tried to pull Maeglin towards him by the calves, opening him to settle inside, Maeglin flipped them to straddle Celegorm’s waist. 

He nipped Celegorm’s collarbone before taking the point of his nipple into his mouth, tonguing it and drawing a low, throaty groan from Celegorm’s mouth. He said, giving Celegorm a look burning with desire up through his lashes, “I want to take you.” Celegorm would look _glorious_ spread out under him, all that creamy hair tossing against the furs, eyes lidded with lust as Maeglin drove him mad with pleasure.

But Celegorm rolled, coming down atop Maeglin, pinning him to the furs. “No. I will not lie under you.” He kissed Maeglin’s neck, and his hands went back to Maeglin’s thighs, seeking to spread them open. 

But Maeglin pushed him back, eyes narrowed. “Then _I_ will not lie under _you_.”

Celegorm made an impatient sound, grabbing Maeglin’s arm, pulling him back. “Do not be like that, my beauty.”

Maeglin’s jaw clenched, and he twisted out of Celegorm’s hand. He had thought Celegorm was a Noldo, but he was just a Golodh in hiding. When it came down to it, Maeglin was a Moriquende and not good enough for Celegorm Fëanorion to lie under, only to fill with his seed. “Either you lie under me, or we are done here.”

Celegorm’s eyes flashed (a Golodh denied what he thought was his by right). He sat up on the bed, facing Maeglin, hands curling into balls on the furs. “I do not lie under men.” Maeglin did not believe him. He would lie under one he thought of as his equal.

“Then leave,” Maeglin turned his head away. He threw fuel on the fire of his anger to dull out the cold hollowness. How many of these Noldor he’d fought beside with were Golodhrim in disguise? How many cousins he’d never met would treat like this? Good enough to lie under them or follow their orders, but never their equal.

Celegorm cursed. He shifted, but not to stand and leave like Maeglin told him to. He reached out for Maeglin, grabbing both his arms and wrestling him back to lie under him. “Why will you not let me have you?” his scent and hot breath smelled like decay, like hands taking what they wanted, uncaring who they hurt as long as they got it.

Maeglin turned his face away, nostrils flared. He would _kill_ this Golodh if he tried to take him by force. He laid rigid, muscles tensed, under Celegorm.

Celegorm blew out a sigh and eased up, not lifting his body from its lower flush against Maeglin’s, but taking the stench of his breath further away from its assault on Maeglin’s face. He touched Maeglin’s cheek, fingertips skimming up the line of its bone out around Maeglin’s ear. He said, voice dropped low, coaxing, “I will take care of you, my beauty. Have you ever lain under a man, hmm? Do you know what pleasures await?”

Maeglin’s gaze snapped back up, locking with Celegorm’s. “It is pleasurable. So why will you not lie under _me_?”

Celegorm’s mouth pursed. “I told you. I do not lie under men. It is nothing against you.”

“I do not believe you.”

Celegorm’s temper roused, fingers tightening their rings around Maeglin’s biceps. “Some men just do not enjoy lying under others! Why must you be like this when you have admitted you find pleasure under men?”

Because you are a lying _Golodh_! Maeglin knew the truth. This Golodh thought to take him for a fool, but Maeglin would peel back the lies and expose the rot within. 

Celegorm’s mind did not leak out of his eyes. Walls fortified it, but not as thickly as other fortresses Maeglin had brushed his mind against, and even those he could have penetrated if he did not care if he were detected. In this moment, anger a pulse beating in the back of this throat, caution and secrecy threw itself out the window. Maeglin sliced his way inside Celegorm’s mind. The truth should be easily discovered, brought close to the surface by their argument. 

Something was there indeed, but it was not a memory Maeglin plunged into, but a web of shadow. It oozed a thick, clotting Power with an alien taste. It did not belong to Celegorm’s mind, and should not be here. It tampered with the natural flow of his mind, warping it around its murky bulk. 

Untainted memories hovered around its edges, draw like a magnet, like smaller Planets orbiting a greater mass. Their whispered threads tied them back to the great bulk, interweaving with it as memories connected to each other would: Boys my age do all sorts of things. He said he did not want to hurt me. And he didn’t. He _didn’t_. 

This alien Power was all wrong. It didn’t belong here. Its presence polluted. Maeglin fashioned his own Power into a reaping scythe, and slashed through the shadows, tearing them away, driving them off, freeing the memory they’d cloaked. It burst open into Celegorm’s mind like a popped seed pod, knife-sharp as the moment of its creation:

Celegorm’s body warred between arching up into the wild pleasure of Oromë’s hand on him, and shirking away from the painful stretch of Oromë’s thick fingers working inside him. He wanted to say three were too many, that it hurt, but Oromë was confident he could take it. He wasn’t a child anymore, and Oromë’s hands and mouth made him feel so _good_. 

Oromë had his needs too, and prepared him like this so that when Celegorm was older, Oromë could fit inside him without hurting him. Oromë never wanted to hurt him. If there was pain, it was no more than Celegorm could bear. And if sometimes Celegorm wished Oromë didn’t like having him suck him so much, well, Oromë had his needs too. Celegorm could not expect Oromë to give him pleasure without giving it in return. And if sometimes Celegorm thought his jaw would break trying to fit Oromë inside his mouth, and he couldn’t stop the tears, it was never more than he could bear.

“Your body takes my fingers like it was made for this, Poldórëa,” Oromë breathed in his ear. Poldórëa was Oromë’s love-name for him. It would pull from his mouth in a groan when Celegorm pleased him. 

Oromë pressed the shape of his cock against Celegorm’s inner thigh, seeking friction. His hand tightened around Celegorm, and Celegorm arched his back, gasping. Oromë made him feel so _good_. 

Celegorm’s pleasure-muddled mind only focused back onto what Oromë whispered in his ear when Oromë said, “You are almost a man now, yes, I think you can take it. Yes, let me just try. I _need_ you, Poldórëa. You can take it, can’t you?” His large hands spread Celegorm’s knees wider, lifting them to loop over Oromë’ thick shoulders and fold Celegorm in half. 

“No, wait! I thought we were waiting until I was older?” Celegorm tried to push him off, but it was like trying to shove against a mountain side, all that muscle and mass did not budge an inch. 

“Hush,” Oromë smoothed large, calloused fingertips over Celegorm’s cheek. “You are strong. It will not hurt more than you can bear, and you know how pleasurable it will be, Poldórëa.”

No, Celegorm did not know, though Oromë spoke of the moment he would finally take Celegorm often when they were alone. He made it sound like the most wondrous thing in the world, and Celegorm hadn’t wanted to wait, not until he’d felt how much it hurt for Oromë’s fingers to stretch him open. And Oromë’s cock was much, much bigger than his fingers! “Oromë, I don’t think I can—”

Oromë breached him with a grunt, forcing his way in. Celegorm screamed. He clawed at Oromë’s mountain chest, babbling for him to take it out, take it out; it was _killing_ him. But Oromë didn’t listen, he kept pushing and pushing, splitting Celegorm open until Celegorm couldn’t see through the white wash of pain. 

Oromë was a liar! This was death! He wanted his father! Please, please, make it stop, please—

Maeglin jerked out of Celegorm’s mind, his own rent with horror. The memory did not stop rewriting itself in Celegorm’s mind. His body had slid off Maeglin’s, and lay slumped against the furs, eyes staring sightlessly, trapped inside the memory. Blood trickled down his lip, bleeding from his nose. He twitched and flinched, making little whimpering sounds like an injured animal.

Maeglin covered his mouth with a fist, as if he could shove it down his throat and gag up all the horror. Sweat broke out on Celegorm’s brow. He started jerking and shaking uncontrollably, tears leaking from his eyes. Maeglin pulled him into his arms, soothing his fingers through his hair, whispering words of comfort that could not reach Celegorm. Celegorm was trapped inside his mind until the memory had wrecked itself into conclusion.

Maeglin knew the moment Celegorm returned to awareness, for he stiffened in Maeglin’s arms, then pulled away, rolling his back to Maeglin. Maeglin lay listening to Celegorm struggle to suppress the wet sounds of his breaths. Celegorm’s voice was a shipwreck, rough and splintered when it came, “What in _Hells_ gave you the right to violate my mind? I was not hurting you!”

Maeglin flinched. “I…I am sorry…I…” Celegorm had been a Golodh, and Maeglin did not ask if he had the right to enter Golodhrim’s minds. He had imposed his will upon and fingered the thoughts of dozens and dozens of Golodhrim. Whoever he needed to, or wanted to. Golodhrim were the violators first and forever. They were animals. They weren’t _people_ anymore. Somewhere between plunging a dagger of hate into his heart and this moment, Golodhrim lost their humanity.

“I am sorry,” he spoke to Celegorm, and to the Maeglin who had died when that dagger sunk its way in and devoured him. He hadn’t asked Celegorm for a yes or no before _taking_ what he wanted. Did that mean he had become a Golodh too?

Celegorm pushed himself up, keeping his back to Maeglin as he grabbed for his clothing. Maeglin sat up behind him. He wavered back and forth between sitting here and saying nothing until Celegorm left, or offering comfort that might rub like sandpaper against the wound. In the end he reached out a hesitant hand and touched Celegorm’s shoulder, “I—”

Celegorm spun, slapping Maeglin’s hand away. “Don’t _touch_ me.”

Maeglin held up his hands, “I am sorry.”

Celegorm’s eyes burned fever-bright, breathing hard and ragged. Then his face shifted like a tick of the light, the line of his jaw seemed almost alpine in sharpness, his cheeks hollowing with shadows. A dark bruise opened inside his eyes. Darkness hovered over his shoulder, its claws cutting grooves into his flesh. 

The sons of Fëanor had enslaved themselves to a Power that knew no mercy, only the hunger of incompletion. The Oath would never stop feeding on their flesh. It would take them all in the end, drag them down into Darkness and devour them. It was a black dragon curled about their shoulders, feasting on their hope, their light, rending every good thing their hands had made before it could reach fruition.

It settled the heavy bulk of its unsatable hunger inside Celegorm’s eyes like a Giant Spider’s bloated sack. It curled its claws around his neck, and _squeezed_. It had seeped in through the cracks splintered in Celegorm’s mind from Maeglin’s callous use. It fed off the memory of tender, young flesh brutalized that had savaged its way through Celegorm’s mind excruciating as the moment of his rape. And backlighting the choke-hold of the Oath was so much _pain_.

Celegorm grabbed him and slammed him back into the furs, coming down atop him with a snarl. Maeglin did not strike him across the face or sink his fist into Celegorm’s gut. He felt for the healing balm in the furs, holding Celegorm back from prying his leg apart until he had the jar open and scooped his fingers inside. Celegorm had enough of himself left in there that he waited for Maeglin to ring his fingers around his cock, coating it, before he wrenched at Maeglin’s thighs again. Maeglin opened them, and wrapped his legs around Celegorm. 

Celegorm thrust into him with a growl, eyes full of Darkness and pain. Celegorm’s mouth was a snarl of teeth and blood leaked out of his nose. Maeglin kissed it. Celegorm bit him, then fisted Maeglin’s hair, yanking his head back, and attacked his neck with sucking kisses and teeth that would leave bruises.

Celegorm’s breath panted loud and hot in his ear. His hands dropped to seize Maeglin’s hips for a better hold as he sped up, pounding himself into Maeglin. His head lifted then and looked down into Maeglin’s face. The Darkness had receded; its hold turned slippery and thin, as if drowning himself in Maeglin’s body had saved him, or at least returned enough of himself to reclaim his mind. 

This time when he kissed Maeglin it was the hunger of passion and not the drive to _hurt_. Maeglin kissed him back, hands mapping his shoulders and the way the muscles in his back shifted as he moved inside him. Celegorm groaned, and touched his forehead to Maeglin’s, eating each other’s breaths as the pleasure climbed into ecstasy. 

Maeglin threw back his head with a cry, neck arched. Celegorm kissed its uplifted arc. His hands slid up Maeglin’s bowed back, until his arms wrapped around him, pulling him closer. Maeglin’s eyes opened from their close of bliss, and found Celegorm’s face knotted, mouth pressed tight to stop its trembling, but his eyes could not catch the tears before they fell and splashed onto Maeglin’s cheek.

Maeglin drew Celegorm deeper into his arms. Celegorm buried his face in Maeglin’s hair. He clutched Maeglin tight, breathing ragged from pleasure and the anguish inside, as he drove into Maeglin hard enough to dance white lights of pleasure against the backs of Maeglin’s eyelids. He released inside him with a sound half grunt half sob.

Maeglin had not reached the crux of his pleasure, but he bit back the need, and kept Celegorm’s body cradled with his. Celegorm did not lift off him after their breathing evened out. He had not even pulled out of Maeglin. He’d just collapsed on top of him, arms wrapped tight enough around the slenderness of Maeglin’s waist for bones to protest. But Maeglin did not push him off or his arms from their constricting hold. He sank his hand deep into Celegorm’s hair, down to the scalp, and carded it through in long strokes.

Time unlooped, Maeglin dosed off, exhaustion catching him in its jaws. A soft voice stirred him back close enough to the surface of wakefulness he could see the light sheeting through the water, but did not break the surface. Another voice answered, chest vibrating against Maeglin’s. The warm body wrapped around him shifted, pulling away. 

Maeglin moaned at the loss, reaching out to draw it back. Fingers touched his cheek, and Maeglin turned into the caress, chasing it. It deepened when Maeglin nuzzled into it. 

The first voice spoke again, and the touch retreated. Maeglin’s hands curled around empty air, a whine of loss pulled from him. Then hands touched his knees, spreading them open, wet fingers slipped inside him. The touch pulled Maeglin closer to the surface, and he heard Fingon saying, “…I will come hunt you down if he is not in fighting condition with the dawn. Light knows what you were thinking! We are in the middle of a battle!”

Celegorm answered from above him, working his fingers with the healing balm deeper into Maeglin, “I said I would take care of it. Now stop hovering.”

A heavy sigh. “I am sorry. I just need my bed. I am falling asleep on my feet.”

“Lie down then already. I need to hear what happened to report back to Maedhros. Why didn’t you wait for us to arrive before launching the battle?”

A body spread out beside Maeglin’s on the furs, and the fingers inside him withdrew. Maeglin cracked opened eyes dragging with exhaustion, and saw Celegorm’s fair head in the low lamp light. He knelt between Maeglin’s spread legs. When he saw Maeglin’s eyes on him, he lifted his hand and caressed Maeglin’s cheek. “Go to sleep, my beauty,” he whispered, “you need your rest.”

“We all need rest,” Fingon grumbled at his ear, and Maeglin turned to see his uncle tucked into the furs beside him. Fingon smiled tiredly, “Sleep.”

Maeglin closed his eyes. The last thing he heard was Celegorm saying, “I will find you when the battle is over.”

Maeglin stood at his uncle’s back. Balrogs ringed them, their shadow wings fencing them in from tip to tip. The heat was like standing inside the mouth of a bubbling volcano. Maeglin’s armor had turned into a furnace, the skin of his face and hands blistered. He could hardly see through all the shadow and smoke. A fire whip cracked, its flame slicing through the dark shadows. 

Maeglin brought his shield up, bracing for the impact. It slapped like a rockslide against him. His boot dug a furrow into the blackened earth wet with the blood and bodies of Fingon’s swore-companions, his Guard. Only Maeglin and his uncle still stood. They would die here together, but at least they would take some of these fell beasts with them! 

Maeglin did not die. He woke up in a Healing Ward. He had never been in this room before, but he knew that style of architecture, this oppressive heat. The Golodh healer curled her lip at him when he asked, voice a ruin, nothing more than a rasp, but she answered. “King Fingon is dead. Turgon is High King now.”

Dead. That wasn’t how any of the stories ended. Fingon and he always came home. But of course this wasn’t a story he made up in the innocence of childhood. It was a nightmare, an unending nightmare all the hope of dawn had been sucked out of. 

After the battle.

After the battle nothing, because Fingon was dead. The summer storm had clawed its way through the land, but flowers did not bloom in its wake, only mud and broken braches. The tide had come in and gone out again, leaving the beach strewn with rotting driftwood and decaying fish.

Hope, lost, and his uncle with it. There would be no more arms slung over his shoulder, smiles bright as daybreak, or nights waking to a body cuddled up to his. All that was left scattered in the dust pile of his palm were nine shining gems, one for each day he’d spent at his uncle’s side. Nine stones, nine days. Only nine days.


	53. I Remember Everything

Intermission: I Remember Everything

Turgon opened the cage. With a tempting nut and a click of his tongue, he bribed the unsociable bird into his hand. After a moment of inspection, the Blue Magpie was seduced, and Turgon carefully pulled the long-tailed bird from the cage. It was a beauty: breast and back a vivid blue, and folded tail trailing down at a length twice that of its body. Elenwë would have loved it.

Elenwë had shared his passion for birds. There were hundreds of bird species in Valinor. Turgon and Elenwë had spent many of their courting years stalking rare species through the woods, and marveling at the haunting calls of the sea-loving varieties. 

He remembered the first time he’d seen her: lying on her belly in the grass with an open sketchbook, her eyes darting from the pages up to the swan she sketched. It was a ladylike hobby, and her fascination with the elegant creatures was encouraged by her mother as a suitable pursuit for a young _poicindis_. But she would have enraptured Turgon even if his first glimpse had been her ridding a wolf and dressed wild as the First Elves in the Outer Lands.

They had defeated the Ice, wrestled their mastery of Arda though it cost them so much to attain that victory. Turgon set foot upon Endor, a New World, one just waiting for the Noldor to take and tame. He could have had anything he wanted, now that the only thing he’d ever wanted was lost to him: a lifetime beside Elenwë.

They told him the pain would lessen with time. It hadn’t. They told him to look to his daughter, to what he still had. But while he lived for Idril, she couldn’t fill this emptiness. The grief was still sharp and metallic as blood in his mouth. 

When the madness he’d known in the white weeks after Elenwë was lost had faded, he wished for it back, for it had held a numbness in the shock. But after the madness came another kind of grief, one so unfathomable and inconsolable that it burned away everything else –the guilt, the denial, even the memory of happiness with her—until all that was left was the knowledge that she was gone. As sundered from him as a Mortal’s death because Valinor was as distant from the Exiles as the mysteries beyond the borders of Arda.

The Magpie croaked, picking at his hand, demanding another treat. Turgon obliged the bossy creature. Birds were simple beasts to please. Elves were much less so.

Turgon felt the weight of the golden crown against his brow. He remembered how it had seemed to rest so lightly upon Finwë’s head. He had worn it when it still shone. The golden jewel at its center had been dull as a rock for many years, and Turgon would have had the crown reforged and tossed the strange stone (no doubt some sorcery of Fëanor’s) away, but for what it symbolized. His grandfather had worn this, his father…and his brother.

Turgon worked hard not to think about Fingon. He did not like dwelling on their parting. But this brother’s ghost haunted him regardless, whispering back all the cutting words and accusations he’d thrown at Fingon. He could find no peace when the afterimages still followed him into dreams:

Turgon had kept his intention secret when Maedhros told him of his Union in the Palantír. Turgon was spiteful like that. He would never forgive that bloodline for Elenwë’s death.

His army had moved as secretly as such a host was able, and come up from the Sirion river valley unlooked for even as Fingon’s army arranged itself in the rocky foothills of the Ered Wethrin in preparation of Maedhros’ preliminary strike. There had been no joy in his reunion with Fingon. The past lay too thickly between them for that.

Fingon brought Turgon to his tent to reveal the plans Maedhros and he had spun. It was there, amid the battle strategies, maps, and contingency plans, that their temporary truce shattered. They quarreled, which was nothing new, but this was something else, something uncontrollable and destructive, like the undamming of a river that had grown all the more treacherous after years of being denied its natural course. There was no stopping their argument once it began, for the words they threw at each other had been building for centuries.

It started with Maedhros. Everything had started with Maedhros. Turgon’s childhood memories of his brother after Maedhros slunk into their lives and poisoned his family’s happiness, were all of being left behind because Fingon choose Maedhros over Turgon as he ever did. In time he taught himself not to let it hurt him. He taught himself how to enjoy quiet pursuits over the audacious adventures Fingon used to take him on. 

But in the end, underneath, down there in that place that used to idolize Fingon, was the hurt. Maedhros already had six brothers, why did he get to steal Turgon’s only one as well? 

But those were the hurts of childhood. He’d learned the pain of Fingon’s betrayal was nothing to the pain of grief so debilitating it felt like he was blind and lame in the dark with the light of his soul and the body that had been his right side torn away. 

Now Aredhel was dead, and it might not be rational, but at Fingon and Fingolfin’s feet Turgon cast this blame: “Aredhel _never_ should have gone to Gondolin. But you –you and father—you never understood her. You never understood either of us!”

Fingon’s breathing was harsh, eyes dilated with anger. “Well if you had not been such a _coward_ Father would not be _dead_. If you had come when we needed you—”

“What need was there for I when Father had Fingon the Valiant?” Turgon sneered. “Fingon the reckless, selfish fool who loved Maedhros Fëanorion more than his own family!”

“It was _you_ who never understood _me_! You were always judging me! Even now you would turn Aredhel’s death upon me!”

“You did not _want_ to be understood!” Turgon’s voice broke on a shout, and his hand swept across the field table, scattering maps and missives to the floor. He slammed his hands down into the wood, and leaned closer to Fingon who stood opposite him, wanting to grind the words into that self-righteous face. “You reveled in being the rebel of the family. Where is your bastard now? Where is Gil-galad, do you know him either? Or was it so much easier to bed the women than take responsibility for the consequences of your actions?”

“Don’t you dare lecture me on my sons!” Fingon snarled, and rounded the table in a few short strides to press up nearly chest to chest with Turgon. 

“Someone has to. Father never did, oh no, not his _favorite_. You make as poor a father as you do a brother, always escaping your responsibilities. It is what you have always done. Running off with your friends, and then running off to save Kinslayers. You wanted to be thought brave and noble, but you were just a foolish little boy drunk on thoughts of glory.”

“Maedhros would be dead if I had not—”

Turgon sent Fingon spiraling over the edge: “Good riddance. One less Fëanorion to pollute the world with their stench.”

Fingon’s fist crashed into his face, splitting his lip and filling his mouth with the taste of metal. He wasn’t surprised; nothing about Fingon’s reactions had surprised him. He whipped the blood off his mouth and looked at Fingon. His gaze was cool when he looked over Fingon who wasn’t offering an apology, was in fact glaring at him like that fist wasn’t half the violence he wanted to commit against Turgon.

Turgon sneered. “You will never change. And I will never forget.” He wasn’t talking about the punch, he was talking about the memories upon memories that hurt so much worse, and that he doubted Fingon felt an ounce of remorse over.

“You want to cast around blame? Well here is some for you: where were _you_? You have no idea, no idea how _hard_ it was for me after Father died! You left me here. Alone.” Fingon’s voice cracked and he turned away, breathing heavily. Turgon would have thought the flashing of Fingon’s eyes before he gave him his back a prelude to tears, but this was Fingon, and Fingon didn’t care about Turgon enough to cry over his loss. 

Fingon didn’t look back at Turgon as he tried to make an escape from the tent. Turgon wouldn’t let him go without getting the last word in: “I will never forgive you. Never.”

Those were the last words he would ever say to Fingon because Fingon was dead, and there was no rebirth for Exiles. When Fingon died, Turgon had not been there at his side. Turgon could not forgive himself for this, because in the end Fingon had been his brother, his only one, and under all the anger and resentment like old roots, he loved him. He wondered, in the darkness of the night when sleep would not come and let him escape the memory of their parting, if Fingon hated him for not being by his side, for never being by his side in Beleriand, as much as Turgon had hated Fingon for never being by his in Tirion. 

*

—The metal scraped loudly against the stone floor as Tuor shouldered another shovel-full of horse shit. He dumped it resentfully into the waiting wheel-barrow as slowly as possible without earning a few smacks from his guard. He was always guarded now, ever since his last bid for freedom had sent two of his Easterling ‘masters’ into the afterlife. His shoulders still burned when he moved, reminding him of the whipping that had left him on his belly in a pool of his own blood as they tore the skin from his back. 

With slow movements (both because he was trying not to aggravate the wounds, and because he would give his slavers the smallest amount of profit from his labor as possible) he sunk the shovel into the pile of manure again. There came the sound of metal striking another metal and sliding against the stones. He paused, tilting a glance at his guard from covert lashes. 

The Easterling leaned against the stall’s railing, a look of utter boredom and irritation on his face that _he_ had to watch the troublesome slave who was too stubborn and stupid to understand that defeat in battle meant a lifetime of slavery to the victors. Why didn’t the slave just accept that by now?

He would never accept his slavery. What these Easterlings couldn’t understand was that an enemy wasn’t defeated until he conceded defeat. 

He waited until the guard looked away, and then bent to sink his hand in the shit pile and fish out the piece of metal he’d discovered. He only had a few seconds to study his find. It was a broken-off arrowhead. It would do. Quickly, before the guard’s wandering attention returned, he tucked his new weapon along the line of his waistband and folded it three times before pulling his loose shirt down. 

He moved a bit faster after that, not wanting to risk a changing of the guard before he made his attempt at freedom. This one had become complacent after hours of watching him passively shovel shit, and had forgotten all the Easterlings he’d killed in his numerous escape attempts. 

When the work was done, the guard pushed off the railing, carrying the two sets of manacles that would wrap around Tuor’s feet and wrists for the transportation to his next work assignment. They’d learned he had to be chained during such times or he would find a way to run. The guard ordered him to toss away his shovel (another thing they’d learned after he’d killed with an iron hammer: anything could be a weapon in his hands).

It had to be now, before the chains closed about his flesh. He threw the shovel aside, and the guard closed the distance between them, gesturing for him to hold out his arms. His arms came up, but first his fingers closed around the broken arrow shaft. In a movement like a striking viper, he sunk the arrow into the guard’s neck, killing quickly before the guard could cry out.

As the Easterling fell, Tuor snagged the short, curved sword from its resting place in the guard’s belt. Now armed, he made for the stable doors. He found another two guards to dispatch, but they, not expecting an attack, were easily dropped. He paused to snag one of the fur caps from their heads and squashed it over his own, lowering the ear and neck flaps to cover as much of his damming yellow hair as possible.

He went cautiously now. The courtyard teamed with horses and Easterlings, and he made sure to keep his eyes on the ground. It was a strange feeling, knowing his father and mother had once walked these same stones, and slept in the keep above. This might have been the last real bed his father had known before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and the last time his mother looked upon his father’s face when he rode out for a war from which he’d never returned. It was an ironic thing that he should feel closer to his parents with his slavers than he ever had with the Elves who’d raised him.

Keeping his head down, he was able to slip unnoted to the gates. There were at least a dozen guards at the gate. He tucked his stolen sword into his belt, and tugged the fur cap lower. He migrated to the shadow of an ox-cart as he shuffled into line. 

The line moved slowly, and his hands grew clammy. He’d never been this close to freedom before, despite his many attempts. If he could just get into the mountains...

Finally the ox-cart he slunk alongside came up for the guard’s inspection, and the driver fumbled in his money pouch for the gate fare. The old man was taking too long! 

His fingers flexed, and he forced his breathing to calm. He knew the moment they noted him. One of the guards shifted, tiling forward on his heels. “You there!” 

He bolted. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d stolen less thread-bare clothing or the required gate toll, close enough to hand the coin over would have been close enough to see the yellow curls the fur cap couldn’t quite conceal.

He ran, bumping into one of the guards, checking his shoulder and sending the guard flying into another one who reached for his sword. Free of the gate, the road curved around the rocky foothills in a board, flattened path to the plains. But he didn’t want to gain the plains. He would be hunted like a wolf pack taking down a hare on the plains, the Easterlings riding him down on horseback. He plunged into the forests lining the road, knowing the trees for his only hope of escape, but already hearing the pounding of hoofs pursuing him. 

On he ran, though they closed too fast, and he wished for what seemed the thousandth time since his birth that he had been born an Elf. This escape attempt ended with a lasso tightening around his stomach, pinning his arms to his sides and jerking him to the ground mid-run. He wanted to fight them, kill them all, but all he could do was snarl and spit and curse uselessly as they tossed his stolen sword away contemptuously, and gave him a few kicks before trussing him up and slinging him over the back of a horse.

They would have killed him, if he’d been any other slave. But foolish, prideful boy that he’d been when they’d taken him (Was it only three months ago?), he’d announced his name and heritage with all the arrogance of youth, so sure they’d kill him and he would die honorably beside his fallen foster-brothers. But they had not killed him. And if he’d been a little less stupid, had a little more of the sense and caution his foster-father had tried to instill in him, he would have known they wouldn’t kill him the moment they learned his identity. To have him a slave was far sweeter.

The guards took him to Lorgan who would determine the punishment his latest escape attempted earned. His back wanted to scream in protest against the coming agony, but he clenched his teeth as they dragged him across the stone floor and forced him to kneel before the ‘Lord of Dor-lómin’.

Lorgan sat sprawled in the carved chair that might once have been Tuor’s father’s. The Easterling chief held a human skull in his hands. As he watched his men yank Tuor’s head back, he took a lazy sip from it. 

Lorgan’s hair was red as a fox’s fur against his brown skin. Lorgan was not the only Easterling boasting red hair. Tuor had seen Easterlings with eyes green as new grass, blue as a winter sky, as grey as a dawn. 

The Easterlings were not so much a race as they were a united culture. Once they may have been able to distinguish between their people and other Edain by their features alone, but over their long journey from the East they had intermingled with every people they’d met. He’d seen short, stocky Easterlings with barrel chests and thick beards, and known them for the descendants of Dwarves. He’d seen slender Easterlings who possessed an inhuman grace, and known they had Elf-blood in their veins. What he’d yet to see though, was an Easterling with hair as yellow as his –a darker yellow, one shot through with red or brown, yes, but never quite his shade—which made his bright hair a flag and a curse.

Instead of getting down to the business of punishment, Lorgan said with that cruel, mocking smirk Tuor hated (and secretly feared): “Do you know who this one was?” Lorgan twisted the skull about so Tuor could get a good look at it. 

Tuor didn’t answer. Other Easterlings had already tried to frighten him with gruesome tales of drinking out of their enemies’ skulls and sacrificing their hearts to the Dark God. But as this last one was a lie he didn’t see why he should believe the first. The Easterlings loved Morgoth no more than the other Edain after his betrayal of them. They served him only out of fear, for they were allyless, having betrayed the Elves and Edain for the Deceiver, only to discover themselves to have been deceived.

“You know,” Lorgan continued when Tuor remained stubbornly silent. “I had always thought the demons’ skulls would be pointed, like their ears. They always struck me as a pointed kind of people. But,” he continued, turning the skull in his hands again so he could look into the empty eye sockets of his dead enemy. “They are just like a Human’s.”

Lorgan raised the skull, taking a measure of ale into his mouth, and letting a self-satisfied smile play on his thin lips as he looked down on Tuor. “Those demons we killed when we captured you were quite fearsome. You must have loved them very much.” Lorgan turned the skull to face Tuor again. “Do you recognize him?”

Tuor snarled, fighting the ropes that bound him, wanting to kill kill kill. He couldn’t see, couldn’t think passed the rage and pain rising from its ever-simmering place in his gut to choke off his very breath. 

He couldn’t escape his bonds, and Lorgan laughed at his attempts. But the laughter was short lived, and Lorgan settled his callous eyes on Tuor once more. “You cost me three more men, Slave.”

Tuor sneered, feeling a dull sort of pleasure in his kills. But it was not enough to sate the hate. It never was. 

Lorgan rose, abandoning the Elven skull now it had served its purpose. 

Lorgan was, unfortunately, not a hideous man. Tuor thought the world would have made more sense if Lorgan was ugly and squat and cross-eyed, but the Easterling lord was well-formed and possessed a sharp mind, though his wits were often turned towards cruelty, but not always. The world would have made more sense had Lorgan been a neglectful lord and poor leader, but he was neither of these things. How Lorgan treated his slaves was not a reflection of how he ruled his people.

“It seems,” Lorgan approached Tuor like a lion stalked its prey, “that you have learned nothing from the lesson of the whip. Were the punishments too soft for you, oh mighty son of Huor?” he mocked. “Do you need a _harder_ lesson.” He gripped Tuor’s chin, forcing his face to turn up and meet the eyes of the one he knelt before.

Tuor glared with all the hatred in his heart at the one who sought to break him. He would never break!

A strange smile shadowed Lorgan’s mouth. “Yes, I think you do need something else, Slave. You think yourself so noble, so lordly. A true ‘Man of the West,’” Lorgan’s fingers slipped into Tuor’s hair, pulling it as he bent to bring their faces nearly nose-to-nose. “You don’t think you are a slave, do you? You don’t understand that I _own_ you. I can do with you whatever I like, and you are powerless to stop me. You. Are. Nothing.” 

Lorgan shoved him hard, and Tuor fell on his back, unable to catch his fall with his hands bound. Lorgan kicked him in the gut, but he only grunted, refusing to cry out. His stubbornness earned him a sardonic laugh, and the hate ate at him like leprosy. 

When he felt Lorgan’s fingers skimming into his waistband, tearing at his breaches, he didn’t understand what it meant at first. He kicked out, fighting –always—but thinking he fought the humiliation of being bound in nakedness before the Easterling. It wasn’t until Lorgan kicked him onto his stomach, and he heard the jingle of a belt loosening, that he began to understand the punishment Lorgan had planned for him.

“No.” He didn’t beg –not yet. He denied. 

He kicked out, trying to gain his feet, as if his feet would help him when he had nowhere to run. The guard that had hauled him into Lorgan’s throne room knocked his feet out from under him, bringing him to his knees, and then dragged him to his belly again. 

“Hold his shoulders,” Lorgan ordered coolly, languidly closing the distance, untying his breaches as he came. 

Lorgan watched him with hooded eyes as he fought for freedom against the hands holding him down. When Lorgan knelt behind him and pulled his breeches down, exposing him, Tuor did cry out, mindlessly, pleading in his fear. The anger had abandoned him now, and he was very afraid, wishing so desperately for a rescue that wouldn’t come because the only family he’d ever known was dead.

Something that tasted like a scream built in his chest, roaring up his throat, pounding against his clenched teeth. It was coming, he couldn’t stop it, couldn’t—it was there, against him, please, _please_ —

Tuor’s eyes flew open, chest heaving for breaths and covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Restless movements, rustling sheets, and distressed moans told him Idril was having another nightmare. Hers had knocked him free of his own. 

His arm lay curled under her heated body as she tossed and turned. He folded her against his chest, kissed her brow, and brushed strands of hair out of her face with a hand he couldn’t keep from shaking. “Shh,” his whispered in her ear. 

There was hardly a night since their wedding either Tuor or Idril did not suffer a nightmare, but most of his were not violent enough to startle her into true wakefulness so she remained ignorant of how relentlessly they plagued him. He preferred it that way.

She cried out, body jerking against him. He shook her shoulder, calling her name until the cage of sleep loosed her mind. She blinked at him, breaths heavy. He stroked her curls, “Him again?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “He killed Eärendil. He killed us all.”

Maeglin was Eärendil’s natural enemy, and would always pick Eärendil to kill first. Eärendil was the hope of the world, and Maeglin a corrupted tool of the Doom that did not want the Noldor to slip from its noose. One day it would whisper into Maeglin’s mind, and Maeglin would follow its will and try to kill Eärendil. Tuor would kill him first.

Idril had told him of the curse Maeglin’s father had laid over him, and how Maeglin’s heart had been ripe for its reaping, for already it had been a dark, twisted place. Maeglin had stood unmoved as stone as his own father pleaded with him, and watched his father’s execution without a twitch. He had even smiled, Tuor had heard. 

Idril had told him of how Maeglin tried to build an army of Wood-elves when he first came to Gondolin before Turgon restrained him. Maeglin had forged them weapons and trained them rigorously. The only thing that had saved Gondolin was the smallness of Maeglin’s army. If he ever got his hands on more Wood-elves, the Noldor would be murdered in their beds. But Turgon had banned Maeglin from acquiring more Wood-elves for his House.

Maeglin was still out their scheming, an agent of the Doom, wholly succumbed to its evil. He would never stop trying to destroy them. If he ever laid a hand on Eärendil, it would be the last thing he did.

Idril drifted back into sleep, lulled by Tuor’s hand stroking through her hair. Tuor sat for a long moment leaning against the headboard, his wife’s soft body pressing into his side. But eventually the memoires of his own nightmare drove him from the bed. 

He walked almost as softly as an Elf from the bedchamber. He had been instructed from his first steps in woodcraft, learning how to roll his feet and carry his weight lightly in his knees so that he passed like a ghost through the woods. These skills had served him well when he hunted his old captors the Easterlings in Dor-lómin, striking at them like a demon from the shadows before melting away again. 

He went to a side table and poured himself a goblet-full of wine before throwing it back. He wished he had something stronger, the whiskeys of the Edain that burned like fire ants on its way down his throat. But the Elves stocked only wines; they didn’t understand the relief found in harsh drinks. They didn’t understand how pleasure could be found in the pain of their consumption. 

Elves didn’t understand a lot of things, these Noldor even less than the Sindar who had raised him. As much as he’d tried to forget it, he was an Adan in blood and body, if not in mind. He kept silent when he felt the Human urges surface, choosing to pretend he was no different from the Elves who raised him and alongside whom he had lived most of his life. The Edain had given him nothing but pain. He may be theirs by blood, but his heart had always longed to be numbered among the Firstborn.

He remembered asking his foster-father Annael, in all the innocence of youth, why his Elven foster-brothers grew so slowly so that even Rothlith, his elder by twenty years, was soon outstripped by Tuor’s aggressive growth spurts. That was the day he learned his parents names, Huor and Rían, and the day he learned what it meant to be forever Other. 

He had been raised by Elves, all but called them his own people, and yet was forever outside. The swiftness of his growth, the dullness of his eyes, the hair on his face and body that he’d grown to hate and shave obsessively, the slowness of his limbs never quite matching an Elf’s grace and speed, were all marks of what he could fight all he liked but never defeat.

He set the empty wineglass down. He felt the perpetual weariness in his mind and body from years upon years of sleepless nights. He longed for his bed, for dreamless sleep, but knew it would elude him. He estimated he’d gotten four hours rest, a good night, as far as his nights went.

His son’s bedroom door was cracked open, and Tuor was drawn to the slip of moonlight it betrayed. He glided to the door, pushing it open the rest of the way, and slipping into his son’s bedchamber. Idril had chosen the west-facing room during the pregnancy. The moment she’d seen the room (with its wall of windows that made you think you stood upon the brink of the world, so long was the fall, so majestic the view), she’d said the baby leapt within her, as if knowing it had come home. 

Tuor crossed the beams of moonlight to sink into the bed beside his son’s sleeping form. Eärendil’s head was a riot of golden curls. His face pressed into the pillow, a wet spot developing from the line of drool running into the cotton. 

Tuor smiled and carded a careful hand through the curls. His sleeping son often drew him in the night when the echoes of screams and those hard, bitter years he’d spent a slave to the Easterling beat against his mind like Lorgan’s hot breath. It never ceased to amaze him that he could have helped create something so pure, so perfect as Eärendil. 

He swore his son would never have reason to doubt his love. Nothing would ever come before Eärendil. Nothing. Especially not his wife. Tuor would be nothing like his own mother.

He loved Idril in his way, though knew it was not a pure love. It was possessive. Idril belonged to him. He was very carefully not to betray these thoughts to her. It would have appalled her, and given her cause to look at him with something other than that blind admiration all in the city had bestowed upon him since his coming which had made it so easy to win power and the Gondolindrim’s trust. 

If she looked deeper she would discover the darkness in him. It was a darkness he strove ever to hide, though the hiding was a great strain upon him, and he lived in fear of the day the blackness of his soul was laid bare. There was so much rage in him, so much hate; he thought it could consume the world. 

Hate had sustained him during those long years alone in the wilderness with only his revenge for friend and comforter. Vengeance was all he had, everything –his family, his home, his honor—all had been stolen from him. Something had been torn from his soul, something he could spent his whole life searching for but never find again, for such was rape’s harvest.

The faces of his foster family followed him into his dreams, and from their lips fell a thousand accusations: if he’d only been stronger, faster, less selfish and naïve, they would still be alive. But in the waking hours he brutally rejected the guilt. It was the Easterlings who killed them and enslaved him, not his own weakness.

But he was so angry, _all the time_. He wanted to taste the Easterlings’ blood –every man, women, and child’s. 

Eärendil turned in his sleep, rolling onto his back and nuzzling his cheek into the hand Tuor had left beside his son on the pillow. Tuor stared down at the face of sleeping innocence. He was disgusted with himself for bringing _those_ thoughts into his son’s bedroom. 

He pulled his hand away from Eärendil, feeling as if his touch would soil his son’s skin. 

He’d thought he’d come to terms with his mother’s abandonment years ago, believed her absence (a women he’d never known) could not possibly still affect him. But the moment he held his son for the first time, with the sweet newborn smell filling his heart, he wondered what deficiency his mother had seen in him that she would choose death over him. She had handed him over to strangers, a race not even her own, to raise her newborn son so that she might embrace death. 

Tuor’s hand clenched in the sheets. Eärendil would never know this pain, these poisonous doubts that had been the first to sink resentfulness and self-hatred into Tuor’s heart. Tuor would make sure of it.


	54. The Atonement Child

Intermission: The Atonement Child

Idril stood upon the High Wall watching Gondolin’s army march out the gates. The columns sliced shinning and straight as a blade through the valley floor, marching in perfect discipline to the Hidden Way. Her father’s signet ring circled her thumb like the weight of the dead. The weight of 15,000 souls. 

How could her father leave her with this burden when he knew— But who else? Glorfindel marched with him into battle, and Maeglin as well, though she would rather fling herself onto a naked sword than let the protection of Gondolin fall into that Cursed boy’s hands. He would kill them all. No, no it had to be her who took up the city’s protection in her father’s absence. She must rule as steward. But the weight bowled her shoulders and cramped her gut with bile.

“Everything will work out. You are strong, my princess.”

She turned to her handmaiden at her side. Her back had not bowled, only in her mind. She was the princess of Gondolin. 

She met Glaweth’s eyes and gave the woman a composed nod, shoulders straight. “Thank you for your confidence in me. I shall do my best to lead our people with wisdom and valor.”

Glaweth’s face showed pride in serving such a strong, but humble lady. The perfect lady. 

Idril swept down from the High Wall, her skirt whispering across the marble stone, guards nodding at their princess as she passed. Once returned to the streets, her maid held out a water skin for her to refresh herself. Idril waved it away, and began the stately walk down the King’s Way back to the palace. Her handmaids, servants, and guards trailed after. All were Noldor. She had not one Wood-elf in her household.

When Gondolin’s stone had been fresh set, the valley still possessing corpses of trees, little patches of wild lands not yet tamed by a plow, she had spoken often to her father in private (never challenging him in public, he needed her to be a pillar of support before their people) of the Wood-elves’ treatment, disturbed by the direction the Noldor’s employment of them was spiraling down into. She did not speak to her father of the Wood-elves anymore. She did not involve herself in the ruling of the valley. Not since _that_ day.

Now she employed no Wood-elf in her household more for fear one would attempt to slit her throat in revenge, than in horror at the enslavement of their people. She could not abide a Wood-elf’s presence near her. She felt their eyes cutting into her skin: her sentence passed, and guilt thick as tar smeared over her. She could not bear to look into their faces. They had to stay away from her, or she would spend every moment of every day tormented by her guilt (had that one lost a loved one? A child? How many children died that day? She never asked, could never bear to. What were their names, their stories? She never asked, could never bear to).

She would atone. She _would_. Had she not dedicated herself since that day to the protection of this city’s inhabitants? It had been an impotent striving before Maeglin came, for there had been no threat but the shadows in her own mind. Now though, now she knew from whence the threat came. The Doom had revealed itself, and she honed in on their enemy. She would save them from him. She would atone. And then her sins would be forgiven, and she might sleep _one night_ without imagining the way the children _screamed_ on that day:

Gondolin, twenty years after its founding.

A knock roused Idril from sleep. She threw on a house robe, pulling her loose hair from its catch in the robe’s back. It tumbled around her shoulders in a tangle of curls. She lit a candle, and opened her chamber door. The Captain of the City Guard stood at its other side.

She straightened her shoulders. The weight of her father’s signet ring circled her thumb. She was steward in her father’s absence as he inspected the outer-reaches of the mountains. “Yes, Captain?”

He wore a grim expression. “Lord Salgant’s men have lit the signal at the Hidden Way. A force of Wood-elves have stormed it by violence. I do not know the numbers of dead in the House of the Harp’s guard, but they do not have the strength to hold them. What are your orders, my princess?”

Idril groped for the doorframe, knuckles whitening around the wood. What were her orders? What was she supposed to do? She didn’t know what to do. What would her father do? Why wasn’t her father here when she needed him?

“My princess?” Did she look as lost as she felt? What would her father think of her? She couldn’t be spineless and hesitant. She had to be strong. Her father had entrusted her with the protection of the city. “My princess, we do not have much time before the Wood-elves penetrate the last ring of the Hidden Way’s guard and break out into the lands beyond. They will scatter, and the chances of us hunting them all down with none slipping through our fingers with the secret of Gondolin are small. Might I recommend we employ the Final Defense?”

She seized on any solution. “Final Defense?”

“Yes, it is the Hidden Way’s protection for such situations as these when the guards are overwhelmed, and the city is threatened. Your father set it up in readiness.”

Her father, yes, he would know what to do, and she would not fail him. She could not. Everyone else had failed him, Fingolfin, Fingon, her aunt, though Aredhel at least _tried_ to be there for him even when no one else was. He relied on her. He _lived_ for her. She had to be the perfect daughter. She had to be _perfect_. She wasn’t allowed to be spineless and hesitant. Her father was depending on her to make the right choice.

“My princess, the lives of everyone in Gondolin are threatened. Will you employ the Final Defense?”

“Yes. Yes, go, use it! And may Ulmo grant you swiftness!” 

He jerked a quick bow of his head, spun, and dashed back down the corridor and out of sight. Her hand unclenched from the doorframe. She drew in a long breath. Everything would be all right. 

She had chosen what her father had prepared for this day, chosen what her father would have, made the right choice, her father’s choice. She had not failed him. He would return and find his daughter had safe-guarded the city in his absence. He would never need to know of her hesitation, her indecisiveness and the feeling of balancing on the toes of her feet on a cliff’s edge. He did not need to know she’d been weak, only that she’d made the right choice and not failed him. 

He lived for her. He kept breathing and existing in this world even though his heart had ripped from his chest when Mother died. He lived on for _her_. She had to make it worth it for him. She had to be perfect. She had to be everything he ever wanted in a daughter. She had to be worth living for. She had to be his pillar of support, his smile, his comfort, his perfect, perfect daughter. She had to be _perfect_.

(So why aren’t you yet, Idril?)

She dressed, and wound her hair up into a bun, pinning it in place, loose curls spilling out to bob around the shape of her face. Then she went to her solar, instructing the servants to send the Captain of the Guard to her immediately when he returned, and began to pace. The restlessness soon drove her out to the terrace overlooking the garden below. If she walked to its southernmost tip, she could cast her gaze over the valley floor to the Hidden Way. 

She saw the signal lamps lighting up the night, the shine of riders galloping over the valley floor, and small black dots surging into the larger black mouth of the Hidden Way cut into the mountain side. The city guard had been stirred from their beds. Torches lit up the wall, and walked through the city streets. 

Something was happening at the entrance to the Hidden Way. The black dots had stopped pushing inside, now they were scattering, running back into the valley, up the mountain’s side, or hiding in the fields, but the large company of riders from the city fell upon them and started rounding them up. 

She felt sick as nets were tossed, Wood-elves caught like rabbits in a snare. The riders rode the Wood-elves down. It was a dangerous chase involving mounted riders and prey on foot. 

Her hands twisted in her skirt. What if someone was injured? What if someone _died_?

She turned away and strode quickly back inside, shutting the terrace doors behind her as if the Wood-elves’ cries echoed in her ears. She paced through the room until a knock spun her around and she cried out, “Enter!”

The Captain of the Guard stepped in, face as solemn as before. “It is done, my princess.”

She swallowed, but her throat stuck on dryness. “And…and did any Wood-elves reach the outer-lands?”

He shook his head, “No, all were stopped in time.”

Her hands clenched in her skirt, but she had to force the question out even though she cringed away, “Did anyone…did anyone die?”

He said nothing for a long moment that lurched out around her. His eyes pressed heavy upon her, seeming to pierce down into the root of her weakness and unearth all her failures. “Nineteen men of the House of the Harp were slain by the Wood-elves. And fifteen thousand Wood-elves died in the employment of the Final Defense.”

Wha—15,000. 15,000. 15,0—The room reeled. Her vision blackened.

She awoke on the floor, the Captain of the Guard kneeling at her side. His hand cupped heavy around her waist, his other slipping under her legs. Even though he had only meant to pick her up, she shoved him off her with haste and a snapped word. She did not like men she hardly knew touching her. He hastened back with a dropped apology to his princess for his presumption.

She fumbled her way blinding into a chair. She could not see passed the brand burning her eyes: 15,000. Dead. How? “What—how did they die?”

He frowned. “They died in the Final Defense.”

“But…what is…what is this Final Defense?”

His eyes widened. “Forgive me, my princess, I thought you knew. That the King had…” 

Her mouth firmed. “No.”

He looked into her face, hesitating, but she clipped out an order to tell her and he did. The Final Defense was a poisonous gas released into the Hidden Way that would choke all enemies seeking to breach it to death. A painful, terrible death. How many children? But the question stuck on the clog in her throat. She croaked at him to leave her, and he did.

She had only a vague impression of stumbling down corridors before she reached her chambers and shut and locked the door behind her. 15,000 dead. Killed on her order. How many children? How many women? How many people whose only crime was a desperation to escape a life spiraling downwards towards oppression? She had the answer to that: 15,000.

15,000. Her mind scrambled around the number’s vastness, could not fit her arms around it, would not swallow it down her throat. It vomited its way up. She doubled over and sicked up on the floor. Again. Again. Until her throat burned and only acidized bile was left. Her stomach cramped around nothing, and she wanted to die from the misery. But when her stomach finally stopped rebelling, there was no relief, for her crime had been branded into the backs of her eyes like a cattle brand, marking her murderess, filling her nostrils with the scent of burning flesh and the screams of children choking to death on poisonous fumes.

Servants knocked on her door, calling out to her to come eat breakfast, her bath was prepared, did she need them to fetch her anything, the lunch meal was ready, lady, please come out to eat, dinner was here, lady, please. Her aunt Irimë’s voice calling to her now, her friends came one by one, but her father was gone and her aunt Aredhel was far from the city hunting, and none of these others could reach her. 

At least _he_ was in the mountains, running away from her as he always ran since the day she’d foolishly confessed her love and ruined _everything_. She could still taste the sweetness of his mouth under hers, the weight of his body when she tumbled them onto the bed, dragging him down atop her, and the heat of his breath on her neck just before he shot up, eyes full of revulsi— 

He would hate her now. He’d already hated her. No, no, it had only been the disgust of a brother who could never look on one he considered a sister with the eyes of a lover (liar liar liar). 

The door’s lock clicked, and opened. She knew it was her father even before he came down beside her on the bed. Only he had the authority to force entry into her room.

His weight was a heavy regard on the side of her face, the angle of her shoulders rolled away from him. Look at his perfect daughter now. Nothing but a crumpled mess in a room that reeked of vomit. Nothing but a murderess, and one that didn’t even had the stomach to shoulder her crimes without falling to pieces.

He touched her shoulder. It was bare, her house robe lost at some point in the hazy days between the moment of her branding and this one. Her nightgown had tangled and slipped low down the curve of her shoulder, exposing a swath of skin his hand now felt too hot upon, his grip too tight, like the touch of 15,000 dead. “Idril.”

She shuddered. But did not cry. She had wept herself dry.

He bent down over her, his other hand scooping the curls from her face, brushing them back so he could pierce her skin with his gaze. She couldn’t bare its weight. Would he leave her now? Lay himself down for death to take him now she’d shown herself to be not worth living for? Just a murderess peeling back the face of the perfect daughter to grin with yellow teeth stained with 15,000 bodies of blood on them.

“Idril, you did what you had to to safeguard the city.”

She stiffened under his hand, then rolled over to look into his face. “Did what I had to? Were you…had you really intended to poison anyone who tried to leave?”

He held her eyes, the silence dragging out, bumping against the ocean floor like a dead body, like 15,000 dead bodies. “I established the Final Defense against an invasion by Morgoth, but the possibility for other uses had been discussed.”

Her eyes swung between his. “Father, would you have done it? Would have given the order if you had been here?”

He touched her cheek, tracing the shape of her face, weighed the weight of a curl between his fingers. He used to tell her how much she looked like her mother, but that was back before Mother died. He did not speak of Mother anymore, not even to her. “I have a duty to keep Gondolin safe. As you did in my absence. Think what would have happened if any had escaped and been captured by the Enemy? Gondolin’s secrecy would be breached, and the last haven of our people lost. Remember why we came here: Ulmo chose me as the protector of the last hope of our people. One day, all the other kingdoms will fall to the power of Morgoth, only Gondolin shall endure. Within these walls we will hold the survival of our people. We _must_ protect Gondolin, or all will fall to the Darkness.” 

“But all those people, the children…Father, the _children_ ,” she turned her head away, face crumpling.

His hand fell to her bare shoulder, drawing her eyes back to him. His thumb caressed her skin, “My daughter, there is one more secret Ulmo shared with me, something I have spoken of to no one else, but share to you now to comfort you. Ulmo imparted this foresight to me: from Gondolin would come the salvation of the world. Do you see now why Gondolin’s protection is paramount? We cannot let her fall, or the world falls with her.”

The comfort stretched thin, and yet she clung to it. It was all she had to hold back the crushing weight of 15,000 bodies. If Gondolin served a higher purpose, if its survival meant the salvation of the world, then didn’t she make the only choice she could?

And yet 15,000 were dead, and no amount of thin comfort could shield her from that. She had to atone for what she had done. If she could save Gondolin, if she could be an instrument in the salvation of the world, then wouldn’t that be enough to pay for 15,000? 

When her father returned from the battle, he returned with a deeper insight into the prophecy that would save the world. _Out of your house shall come the hope of Elves and Men…from you and from me a new star shall arise._

Her path set itself into stone blocks. She climbed them towards the salvation of the world, towards atonement. From Turgon’s seed would come the salvation of the world, and he had no seed but her. She would marry the seed of Húrin and from them would birth a new star (she had always hoped Glorfindel…but she must atone, and he loved her not). The prophesied child would be her atonement child, and wash away 15,000 sins within the light of its salvation.


	55. Chapter 43

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 43

Year 509 First Age, Gondolin

Maeglin broke into the open air, more than grateful that today proved cloudy and he didn’t have to endure the harshness of sunlight. The palace terrace was high and wide, and the wind galloped through his hair and snatched at his tunic without restraint. 

He’d been stuffed inside the decadent council rooms for far too long. The council meetings had managed to become even bleaker, and more pretentious, the moment Tuor sauntered through the gates of Gondolin. But no, the starfall of all Maeglin’s hope was the moment Fingon died.

Gil-galad was the rightful king of the Noldor. Maeglin had been there at that war council, and Turgon as well, when Fingon sliced through any murky depths of doubt about the line of succession should he fall in the battle: the kingship passed to Gil-galad. His mother Fuilmë and Fingon’s son Guilin would share co-regency, ruling until Gil-galad came of age. If Guilin fell in the battle, his son Gwindor would take his place as regent. After both Guilin and Gwindor’s deaths, Fingon had named Maeglin as regent beside Fuilmë. 

Maeglin should be out on these prison walls other side helping his cousin prepare for his day of kingship, but Turgon had made sure nothing stood between him and claiming the throne. He’d had his lords give him a battlefield coronation, using the desecration of Fingon’s army that left Gondolin the power on the field to override any protests. Most of Fingon’s people wanted what the Golodhrim scorned: a child king with a woman as the power behind the throne. That was their king’s last wish, and they would cling to it like a barnacle. They in turned scorned the idea of taking the knee before Turgon who had not come to their aid during the Battle of Sudden Flame. 

Officially Turgon had been crowned High King –not that the Noldor outside of Gondolin would ever acknowledge him—and those Golodhrim lords hungry for more power were eager to uphold that claim, and press Idril’s to keep the crown alined with their interests. But after Idril and Tuor’s marriage and the birth of Eärendil, the future swing of power’s pendulant grew murky with the question of the child’s heritage. Was he Elven? Or would he live the short life of his father, and thus never be a contender for the throne? 

A gleeful shout stole Maeglin’s attention. That had been a child’s high voice. Children were the rarest of treasures in Gondolin where the low birthrate it had possessed at Maeglin’s coming had dropped with the years until only a dozen or so were born a year. Maeglin followed the curve of the terrace wrapping around the second story of the palace, seeking out the source of the shout. 

He’d only been intending to observe from a distance (a Golodh parent would not want him within spitting distance of their child), but his heart jumped into his throat when he rounded the corner. The child’s feet planted on a jutting block of white stone in the railing. The boy stood on his precarious roost with his arms flung wide, spread hands reaching up as if he meant to embrace the sky. He looked like a bird poised for flight. 

The wind made love to a head of golden curls, and though Maeglin had never spoken with the child, he knew, even from the back, his identity. Maeglin closed the distance between them, catching the boy about the waist. He didn’t think his heart would start beating again until the boy’s feet were firmly on the ground. 

Eärendil wore a pair of leggings and a billowing undershirt that the wind used as a plaything. He wore no tunic, and as Maeglin hauled him down, his fingers wrapped around the child’s bare stomach. There was nothing softer in the world than a babe’s skin, and the reminder of just how young and tender the boy’s years sparked anger in Maeglin’s heart. Where was the child’s minder? Eärendil had no business standing on the lip of a drop that would have shattered his fragile body and cracked his head open like an egg!

A surprised little face framed by curls stared, open-mouthed, up at him. “What do you think you were doing?” He set Eärendil on his feet, but kept his hands on the boy’s shoulders. 

“Practicing,” Eärendil answered with a strange sort of defiant shyness in the face of a stranger’s temper.

“Practicing getting yourself killed?” Maeglin glared at the boy.

“Practicing my flying!” Eärendil’s face lit up like it carried a secret sunrise. “I’m gonna be a bird when I grow up!”

Maeglin’s hands slipped from the boy’s shoulders. “A bird.”

“Cause I wanna fly,” Eärendil nodded sagely. 

“Have you shared this dream with your mother,” Maeglin asked, fighting a smile. 

Eärendil ducked his head and mumbled something.

“What was that?” The smile won.

“Not yet,” Eärendil admitting, rubbing a bare foot along a crack in the stones. His courage swooped back in and he snapped his eyes up at Maeglin challengingly, “Are you gonna make fun of me?”

“No, of course not. I only ask that you practice your flying from the ground.”

“But then I can’t feel the wind! How can I fly with no wind?” 

“Well,” Maeglin contemplated this serious deficiency. “Birds can take flight from the ground, so I think that would be a good skill to practice.”

Eärendil scowled before relenting, and smiled up at Maeglin. He skipped back over to the block he’d been perched so heedlessly on. His head barely reached the terrace railing. He touched the block sadly, “Can I still sit on it?” He looked back at Maeglin with very big, very blue eyes.

“I suppose,” Maeglin folded. “But only if someone is with you,” he warned as Eärendil set about climbing the vine carvings in the terrace railing. 

He pulled the boy from his spider-like assent, and set him atop the block with Eärendil’s knees facing the palace wall and his back to the open sky. Maeglin caged the small body with his arms, one palm planted on either side of the boy lest he topple backwards. The child felt so very small and breakable. It had been a long time since he’d been around such a little one, not since Legolas.

“You’re not a meany.”

“Why would I be mean?” 

“Everyone says you’re a bad man, and I thought so too since you’re always frowning, but I don’t think it’s a mad frown anymore. Are you sad?”

Maeglin leaned away from the blue eyes studying him with such innocence. “Why do you think that?”

“Cause my daddy gets a frown on his face when he’s sad. My mommy told me not to worry cause it’s not a mad frown, but it still makes me sad that Daddy is sad.”

Sadness and Tuor did not fit properly in the same sentence. Not Tuor, the darling of the city and the gods very own messenger boy, if the man was to be believed. Maeglin’s strongest impression of Tuor was Tuor flashing a charmer’s smile around, and tossing his golden curls from his eyes. And glaring at Maeglin as if Maeglin were the blight upon blights of the world, but this was not so shocking since he possessed the kind of personality to attract Idril. Idril had never forgiven Maeglin for daring to desire her once upon a time, and never failed to show him exactly how repulsive she found him when she walked out of any room he dared to infect with his presence (as long as it would not cause a breach of protocol to do so).

“Why is your father sad?”

Eärendil shrugged, “Maybe Daddy misses flying. He was a bird once too, he told me so.” Eärendil tilted his head up to face the sky, “My daddy says the clouds sail in the sky like ships, see?” He pointed skywards, and Maeglin supposed the clouds did look a bit like a fleet of ships today. 

“What’s it like?” Eärendil asked.

“What is what like?”

“Everything. Ships, sailing, the sea. My daddy says it’s like flying –sailing. Is it?”

“I wouldn’t know.” 

“Haven’t you ever seen the sea?” 

Maeglin looked away as memories swallowed him down their tight throat. He couldn’t breathe through the beauty and longing. The blade of his grief had never dulled. “In a way.” He could hear his father’s deep voice teaching him the secrets of Nan Elmoth, and feel the Land humming under his skin with a clarity and headiness he had not felt since he left home. He could still feel the warmth of his father’s hand curved around his shoulder, eyes brimming with pride as he looked at Maeglin.

“My daddy has. He used to live by the sea. He told me. He did silly things there.” Eärendil’s eyes shone with excitement. “He went swimming with no clothes on!” He giggled. “And he ate mussels!” He pointed to his thigh, obviously associating mussel with muscle. “And he ate real bird eggs! Not chicken eggs, but curly ones he had to hunt for and fight off monstrous snakes and bears to get!”

Maeglin’s mouth twitched. “You mean curlew eggs?”

“Yes, that’s what I said. It’s a bird with long legs. My daddy told me,” Eärendil nodded wisely. Then hopped to a completely unrelated topic as was the habit of children: “Could we get some candied apples? I’m hungry.”

“I think we could track some down.” _Or you could just smile at the cooks,_ Maeglin thought as he scooped Eärendil off the railing. 

The little bird in training skipped across the stones of the terrace, then something over Maeglin’s shoulder caught his eye, and his face split into an enormous smile. “Daddy!” he flew, arms outstretched like a sparrow, across the stones.

Maeglin turned to watch Tuor scoop his son up into his arms, and settle him on his hip. Eärendil became a chatter box in his father’s arms, but Tuor hadn’t taken his eyes off Maeglin. Maeglin’s skin had grown tough and weathered to looks of distain, but even in the city of the Golodhrim, the hatred in Tuor’s eyes shone like a bonfire. Maeglin had known the Man held him in contempt, but never had Tuor pulled back the veil and poured the full measure of his hatred onto Maeglin like this before. 

What had he ever done to earn such hatred? He had stopped asking himself that where the Golodhrim were concerned. For them, it was enough that he existed, but Tour was not a Golodh. Or at least he hadn’t been when he arrived in the city, but the Golodhrim had a talent for molding those around them into their own image. They worked hard to foster hatred in a heart, nursing it upon the tit of their own until they’d poisoned a heart to a shriveled, blackened lump.

Tuor’s fingers wrapped around Eärendil’s curls, and he tilted his son’s head back so Eärendil’s eyes landed on Maeglin. Eärendil smiled and waved, the picture of sweet innocence. Tuor said, not taking his eyes off Maeglin, “I do not want you to speak to that man again, Eärendil. He is a bad man, an evil man. He will try to hurt you.”

Eärendil’s face screwed up. “But he is my new friend!” Tuor’s fingers tightened in Eärendil’s curls. “Ouch, Daddy! That hurts!”

Tuor’s eyes flickered away from Maeglin down to his son. Tears welled in Eärendil’s eyes, his little fingers trying to pry his father’s hand from his hair. Tuor released him, and petted the abused scalp. “Shh, I am sorry.” 

Eärendil sniffled, rubbed his nose, and laid his head down on his father’s shoulder. “I forgive you, Daddy.”

Tuor’s eyes lifted back to Maeglin’s, a burning lake inside them, as if _Maeglin_ were at fault for Tuor’s fingers pulling Eärendil’s hair. “That man was only pretending to be your friend. Inside, he was thinking about hurting you. He is like the evil Orcs I told you about. You must run away whenever you see that man coming.”

Another voice cut in like a storm of golden light. “Stop poisoning the boy’s mind with lies.” Glorfindel stepped out of the shadow of the balcony doors. His eyes did not flicker from Tour’s face to Maeglin. He looked, as he ever did, the epitome of Golodhrim beauty, with a face perfect and cold enough to have belonged on an ice statue’s.

“They are not lies,” Tuor threw back, “but prophecy and fate. This one’s own father Cursed him with his dying breath.”

Glorfindel’s face did not break from its cold, remote lines. “Ugly rumors and superstitions, that is all you are peddling in your son’s ear.”

Tuor’s chin lifted. “Idril has dreamed the destruction he will bring down upon us.”

“Idril does not possess the gift of foresight. Her dreams are nothing but the conjuring of her own mind.”

Tuor’s belief in Maeglin’s evilness had not bent one jot. With one last hate-filled glance cast at Maeglin, he swung around and strode away, boots clipping sharply against the marble stones. Eärendil looked back at Maeglin from over his father’s shoulder. His eyes pooled with tears, lip trembling. He did not wave at Maeglin, but watched him with those big, sad eyes until Tuor rounded the corner and took him from Maeglin’s sight. 

Maeglin did not expect to ever see those eyes look at him with sweet trust and innocence again. How long before Eärendil was properly indoctrinated into the mold of a Golodh, and his lip curled with disgust when he saw Maeglin, when he looked upon a Moriquende? It was always only a matter of time. The children bred in the corpse city often grew into the greatest monsters of them all, taught from a young age a Moriquende’s _proper place_.

Maeglin turned away, heart heavy with sorrow. He caught the flash of Glorfindel’s golden hair as the Golodh strode away. Maeglin’s eyes narrowed on that back, and he set out after him. Glorfindel quickened his stride. Maeglin sped up. Glorfindel ducked around a corner. By the time Maeglin rounded it, an empty corridor greeted him.

Glorfindel wasn’t performing his disappearing act on Maeglin _this_ time. Maeglin walked softly down the corridor and eased the door of the first room open. Empty. He went to the next. Glorfindel startled from his lean against the wall beside the door. He shot wide eyes like a cornered doe at Maeglin. 

Maeglin slammed the door shut behind him and bore down on Glorfindel, smacking his hand into the wall beside Glorfindel’s head, leaning forward to pin Glorfindel with his glare. “What was _that_?” 

Glorfindel’s lips parted, and his eyes dropped to Maeglin’s lower face, to his mouth. Maeglin’s jaw ticked. Of course. It was always about getting something they wanted for a Golodh. They did not possess altruistic motives. 

Maeglin leaned closer, close enough he could feel Glorfindel’s breath on his lips. Glorfindel’s pupils dilated, breaths speeding up. “So,” Maeglin hissed, “you thought I would feel _grateful_ enough to owe you a little favor, hmm? Maybe some time down on my knees for you? Or were you thinking you _deserved_ a proper ride for standing up for this little Moriquende?”

“No!” Glorfindel’s face bleached of color, smacked with shock and horror. Maeglin frowned, studying those wide eyes swinging between his on the chain of desperation. “I never expected anything in return, of course I did not. You do not own me _anything_. It is I who owe—” Glorfindel’s teeth snapped shut, eyes flickering away.

Maeglin’s eyes narrowed. “You owe me?” It seemed unbelievable that a Golodh would ever acknowledge a debt to a Moriquende. “For what? The time you assaulted me in the garden? I would think you considered the _generous_ gift of the Wood-elves in your House’s service enough to cover far more than a stolen kiss. You could probably fuck me, and still think it was no more than you deserved—”

“No,” the word shredded in the air, no more than a gasp. “Stop. I never—I never thought…” Glorfindel shook his head, eyes squeezing shut. “And it was not…” His eyes opened, revealing an ocean of guilt. He confessed on a breath, “I molested you. It was when you were struck down by grief, I…I did not come into your room with the intent, but…I touched you when you were sleeping.”

Maeglin stepped back, stepped away, face twisting in disgust. What kind of man preyed upon another when they were in so much pain they wanted to die? 

Glorfindel’s face spasmed as he looked into Maeglin’s open revulsion. A sob wretched from his throat, hand flying up to press against his mouth, eyes squeezing shut. “I am sorry. I am so—you cannot know how _sorry_ ,” his hand pressed against his chest, nails digging in like his heart was battering its way out through his sternum. 

A Golodh had never apologized to him before this moment. Maeglin wouldn’t have believed Glorfindel if the anguish of soul-deep remorse was not bleeding from every broken word, every wounded line in his face. 

Like a man who had been shipwrecked on an island so long he forgot what hope was, and stopped searching the horizon for rescue, but then, one day it came unlooked for, flowing in with the tide, sweeping him off his feet: yearning rocked Maeglin. His mouth felt dry of words, but yearned for the sweet water of forgiveness to fill it as it had not yearned for years and years stretching out in the blackened plain of his heart. He wanted to forgive this Golodh. No, this man, just a man, a human being, someone who’d made a terrible mistake and was _sorry_ ; not an animal incapable of empathy or remorse.

The yearning to forgive tingled in his dry mouth, searching for water. But Maeglin could not quite… He had to see what those hands had done to him. He needed to look upon his violation with his own eyes and know he forgave not in ignorance but with the honey-water of compassion.

He touched Glorfindel’s shoulder. “Show me.” Glorfindel’s eyes snapped up to his, horror at what he’d done still crippling him. “Open your mind to me, and let me see what you did.”

He thought Glorfindel would refuse him because he’d spent so many years seeing only a Golodh when he looked into Glorfindel’s face. But Glorfindel showed him yet again that he was a human being capable of humbling himself before a Moriquende and drinking the full cup of repentance. “Yes,” he whispered, voice a thread from snapping. “You should know what it is I have done.”

Maeglin took Glorfindel’s jaw in his hands, felt the way Glorfindel trembling under his touch. He looked into Glorfindel’s eyes and slid gently inside him, like slipping into a virgin’s body. He would not hurt Glorfindel as he had hurt Celegorm with the brutality of his penetration.

The memory swirled him down into its mouth. He watched Glorfindel’s hands touch him, and himself call out for Breglos. He saw Glorfindel’s tears as he wept over Maeglin’s pain, the gentleness in his touch, the unselfishness of the act born of the desire not to please Glorfindel’s needs but give Maeglin some small comfort in his pain. 

And Maeglin heard the whispers of layer upon layer of memories, all shooting out roots this one grew out of. Tender as Glorfindel’s touch had been, selfless as the act, this memory caged inside a thicket of thorns. Poison sunk into all the corners. A woman’s voice, sharpened into a blade: _I have told you and told you what will happen if you do not cut this revulsion out of you! I have tried so hard to help you, and yet here I find you fingering yourself like a whore!_ Ecthelion’s voice, smeared with lust and darkness, _Gods, look at you fucking yourself on my cock. Beg for it. Come on, I want to hear you begging for me like a slut._ And Glorfindel’s voice, not yet climbed down into the depths it would achieve as a man, but still blooming beauty even as it knifed its own heart: _I hate myself. I promise._

Maeglin retreated from Glorfindel’s mind, easing out with the softness of a kiss’s ending. He took Glorfindel’s face into the shelter of his palms, captured those tortured eyes and said, “I would forgive you. But there is nothing to forgive.”

A sound straddling a sob stumbled out of Glorfindel’s mouth. “But I—what I did—I enjoyed it.”

Maeglin nodded, “Yes. But does enjoying it mean you took for yourself? Because what I saw was a man moved on the orbit of compassion, not lust. Tell me, if I pushed you away, would you not have stopped?” Maeglin saw the answer he knew he would find in Glorfindel’s eyes. “Yes, because you were not touching me out of a place of a predator. You were not preying upon me; you were trying to comfort me. So there is nothing to forgive.”

Glorfindel gasped, heaving in breaths as if a great, terrible weight had been lifted off his shoulders. A tear spilled down his cheek, eyes shutting and face contorted as if by pain, but it was not pain. It was the digging out of guilt, the casting it off, the labor pains of birthing absolution. 

Maeglin kissed Glorfindel’s brow, his cheek. Glorfindel trembled inside his touch. “Yes,” he whispered, “forgive yourself.”

Glorfindel’s fingers fumbled on Maeglin’s sleeves, clenching but not daring to voice his need. Maeglin heard him, and pulled him into an embrace. Glorfindel melted into his arms, face burrowing down into Maeglin’s neck like he wanted to cocoon himself in the warmth of Maeglin’s skin. 

Maeglin closed his eyes and tasted honey in his mouth, a sweet well of compassion bubbling up under his tongue. He held in his arms not a Golodh, but a person. A man in whose fields Wood-elves bent their backs, and who dinned upon slave labor, but who carried no animal under his skin, and no stench, just the scent of humanity, of mistakes and guilt and tenderness and pain. 

Maeglin said, “I am leaving for my mines tomorrow, but when I return, if the offer is still open, I would dine with you, share a glass of wine, spar, spend time together. Call you friend.”

Glorfindel’s arms tightened around him. “Yes,” he breathed. “ _Yes_.”

Maeglin smiled into Glorfindel’s hair. “Then I will see you in a few months. Cousin.”

*

Maeglin had not been entirely truthful with Glorfindel. He was not on the way to _his_ mines, but the Mines of Anghabar far north of the boundary line Turgon had imposed. Maeglin’s own mountain had yielded only weak strands of ore and precious gems, and soon been depleted. Maeglin needed money to continue providing for the Wood-elves in what small ways he could, and had searched the mountains north of the White Lady for rich deposits his people could mine in secret. 

The Mine of Anghabar contained deep strands of hard iron ore as well as many precious gems, but more importantly: they were north of the patrolling Golodhrim, and thus the risk of discovery dropped. Luckily, Wood-elves living outside the city were monitored by their lords. As long as all the Wood-elves of his House were present and accounted for on inspection days, no Golodhrim took notice of the dozens of missing Wood-elves gone north to work the mine.

Maeglin and Nídon would reach the mine midday tomorrow. Tonight they camped under the starlight and talked in the Star Tongue as they prepared and ate their supper. 

Maeglin took a few bites of his stew before Morfin nudged his knee impatiently, wanting him to get on with Morfin’s grooming. The wolf had charged into a thicket after a hare earlier in the day, and been rewarded with a coat-full of burs that were starting to aggravate him. Maeglin set his bowl aside to pick a few more burs out of the thick grey pelt.

Thinfin sat at Nídon’s knee, watching him with pleading eyes as the stew disappeared into Nídon’s mouth. Nídon flicked a piece of rabbit meat off his spoon, and Thinfin snapped it out.

“You are spoiling him,” Maeglin said around a smile.

“Speak for yourself,” Nídon pointed with his spoon at Maeglin’s own meal neglected to tend to Morfin.

Maeglin opened his mouth to retort, but just then Morfin picked his head up from where it rested on his paws, and looked north. The wolf’s ears swiveled, tongue lulling out to scent the air. When Thinfin did the same, Maeglin strained his ears. He thought he heard jinglingly metal, maybe snapped twigs.

“The crickets,” Nídon said as he stood and drew his axe, “they stopped singing.”

Maeglin sprung to his feet, drawing his sword. Morfin’s eyes glinted in the firelight, and Thinfin’s teeth pulled back to bare his fangs. They growled deep in their chests, and any doubt that it was just a wandering buck was silenced.

There were no more questions when they heard harsh voices. They were close enough to pick up the guttural sounds of Black Speech. Maeglin motioned for them to head south, downhill, towards the tree cover. Nídon took the lead, Maeglin running after his light-footed form.

There was a shout behind them. Their camp had been discovered and the hunt begun. They had set up camp on a high pass between the mountains. The lands about were barren of trees, the dark mountain forest crawling to a halt further down the steep, rocky slopes. Arrows soon whizzed passed their ears as they ran for the tree line. 

Maeglin risked a glance back over his shoulder. It was hard to judge the Orcs’ numbers in the darkness, but he guessed they’d made the right choice in running. There had to be at least fifty dark figures pursuing them.

Nídon stumbled and cried out. An arrow protruded from his back like the spike of a sea urchin. Maeglin slung an arm around Nídon’s waist. Nídon tried to shove him off, “Go! Leave me! You will never make it with my weight!”

“Do not be an idiot! I am not leaving you!” 

Nídon took one look at the stubborn set of Maeglin’s jaw, and snapped his teeth shut on any more arguments. He started running again, weight leaning into Maeglin’s hold. An arrow flew passed Maeglin’s ear, inches from imbedding in his skull. 

Nídon shared a single, brief look with him that said everything. They chose to fight rather than die with an arrow in their backs. They dropped behind a rock outcropping, using its cover and the darkness to conceal them.

Maeglin watched the Orcs close on them from where he crouched, Morfin and Thinfin beside him. He knew they were going to die as the Orcs closed in and he was able to get a better look at their odds. There were well more than fifty. It was strange to see so many Orcs in the mountains. It spoke ill that such a large party sulked around even this far north of the valley.

They rose with a war cry as the Orcs fell upon them. Back-to-back they fought. Morfin and Thinfin wove in and out, picking off Orcs like scavenging birds. When Thinfin’s head went flying, severed from its body, Maeglin felt it like a knife to his chest. Morfin fell soon after without his constant shadow fighting beside him as a double-blade and shield. 

Maeglin and Nídon stood longer, and took many Orcs with them, but there always seemed to be another Orc waiting to fill the slain one’s place. Nídon’s arrow wound slowed him down. His reaction time on his right side grew sluggish, blood-loss and pain weakening him. 

They were encircled, Orcs jeering, playing with their food. Maeglin hacked and slashed, covering Nídon’s back and right, but Nídon struggled to lift his axe now. An Orc lunged forward and knocked the axe from his hands. More claws surged in and started dragging Nídon away, separating him from Maeglin, and though Maeglin killed and killed, he could not fight back to Nídon’s side. 

He heard Nídon scream. Blood-lust roared through his veins, and he let out a war cry and threw himself on the Orcs. They fell back under his onslaught, fleeing from the fell light in his eyes. He caught a glimpse of Nídon. He was still alive. An Orc had pulled the arrow from his back. They meant to take him captive. Maeglin had to reach him and give him a mercy killing. 

He poured every ounce of his strength into reaching Nídon’s side. He cut his way through, and Nídon met his eyes one last time, a smile a relief and gratitude on his lips as Maeglin sliced through his throat. 

He’d left himself open in his desperation to reach Nídon. A blade slipped through his guard, slicing up the length of his sword arm, right through the joints of his fingers and down to the bone along the thicker flesh of his forearm. His sword dropped from his gutted hand as he cried out, and though he could have fought on with his left hand if only given a moment to pick up the blade, he didn’t have a moment.

He would have welcomed death, but the Orcs bound him cruelty and beat him for the many Orcs he’d slain. They tossed him, a bloody mess, into the dirt. Their gloating promises feasted on him like vultures: they were taking him north, to Angband.

He closed his eyes as they dragged Nídon’s corpse out to _play_. He could not shut off his ears though and heard them violating it, and then the sounds of ripping flesh as they feasted. 

When dawn rose over Gondolin and swept its streets clean of filth, burning the corrupted flesh under its harsh light of justice, Nídon wanted to go East. His greatest comfort in his long years of enslavement had been memories of the starlight and wild, free lands he’d wandered through on the Great Journey. He spoke of the Quendi who had never crossed into Beleriand, but lived in forests and green woodland gleans. He sang of freedom in the Star Tongue, and of the day he would walk green paths again, breathing in the scent of a forest and freedom.

Maeglin would have missed him terribly, his first friend through their imprisonment, but he would not have much time for missing loved ones where he was going. There would only be pain and the question hanging like a specter over his every breath: would he break? Would he fall down into the Dark and loose himself until only the Lost remained? 

There would be no Fingon to rescue him. No one was coming to save him. But there was the memory of his father to cling to. His father had lived through this. His father had not Lost himself in the Dark, though it preyed upon him and followed him into every shadow of the night for the rest of his life. Maeglin could not lose himself. He could _not_. When his _fëa_ unraveled from his body, he had to be Maeglin Starchild still, or how would he find his father’s _fëa_ in the vast expanse of the universe? Only Maeglin Starchild knew the way home.


	56. Chapter 44

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 44

Morgoth’s eyes dripped the venom of corruption’s genesis. Malice had birthed inside the chamber of his lungs. He had spun despair into the fabric of the world. 

But Maeglin looked into eyes darker than the blackness of lions’ hearts, and did not fold onto his knees. He was Maeglin Starchild, son of Eöl Starborn and Aredhel Finwëion, and he. Would. Not. Break.

They beat him, whipped him, starved him, and strapped him to a giant wheel to pick him apart, delicately, piece by piece. But he would _not_ break. He was Maeglin Starchild. He armored himself in the pieces of himself, and wore it over his skin when hands violated him.

When he did not break open and babble the secret of Gondolin, Morgoth sunk into Maeglin’s mind and split it open. It had been so laughably easy for Morgoth to rip apart what had been Maeglin’s greatest strength. Morgoth played with him, plucking at cherished memories of home and ones that tasted of bile and a daggered heart, all were held up before him and mocked, soiled with scornful laughter. It had gone on and on until the line between mindscape and the realm of the physical crossed and tangled, and it was so _hard_ to separate what the nightmares Morgoth wove inside his head and the nightmare his living body was prisoner to.

But there was one place Morgoth could not touch, because fragile as Maeglin’s mind had shown itself to be, he still had strength enough to lock up the secret of Gondolin in a room so dark and deep in his mind that he would be driven utterly mad before Morgoth ever took it from him. But he had had to sacrifice _everything_ to keep this one secret.

No promises loosened his tongue. It had been the whisper in his ear while Morgoth shred his mind, pulling up every lions’ face, every thigh stained with blood, every time his mouth parched dry, no forgiveness for _this_ , every moment he looked into their eyes and could not see beyond _they killed him_ , every broken rib in an alleyway and spit wad in his face and sneered _Moriquende_. 

Morgoth showed him how it would be when they took the city: lion corpses piled atop corpses, filling the streets of the corpse city, with the corpse king’s head mounted on top. And his people dancing in the fields they’d once broken their back in, their necks lifted high, no boot to crush them into the dirt, the doors of the prison cell lay twisted and splintered by the hands of justice, and they walked out, their voices lifted in Star-song as dawn shook the sky. 

It had been the promise of justice. Justice and then…nothing. Just nothing. Just to end, to cease to be, for all the pain, years upon years of it, to be over. 

He was broken in a dark, unnamed pit. And it had been the most exquisite thing he ever tasted. He released everything he was. He didn’t want to hurt anymore. 

He should have been horrified by his weakness, the complete folding of his mind, but oh gods he’d never know how _good_ it would feel. All the bitterness washed away, grief a word unlearned. He became a traitor, betraying them just as they’d always thought he would from the moment they’d thrown his father onto the rocks, and it felt so _liberating_.

Morgoth let him go like a master releasing a favorite pet dog after it performed a good trick. He sat for hours, days, weeks, before the Iron Gates. They seemed to stretch up for miles, maybe they did; it was hard to measure with nothing but darkness in the sky like a thunderhead of fouled air. 

His legs had folded under him the minute the gate clanged closed behind him. They were watching him. He could feel their eyes crawling over him like their hands had. A sensible creature would have fled the place it had known such torment. A creature with any life-preserving instincts left at all would have run and run and run and never looked back. 

He stood up, legs almost buckling under his weight so that he had to scramble for a hold in the hard rock of Angband’s walls, but he got to his feet. He started walking. South. South to Gondolin though he didn’t know why. Maybe he just wanted to die with those whose lives he’d sold. Maybe the only reason he kept placing one foot in front of the other, dragging what was left of him back to the prison cell, was because he couldn’t face how badly he’d failed. He’d Lost himself. He didn’t know how to find home again. He’d broken, and there was no Maeglin Starchild anymore. 

*

Glorfindel had been the only Noldo in Gondolin to notice Maeglin’s extended absence before the Flight to Freedom. Five months and Maeglin had not returned from his mines. Glorfindel had debated with himself over calling at the House of the Wolf or ridding out to Maeglin’s mountain, but in the end was too uncertain of his welcome. Maeglin had said, but…what if he’d only made the promise of friendship in the vulnerability of the moment?

Glorfindel did not take his concern to any other Noldor’s doorstep, especially not Turgon’s. Maeglin and his House could do without the increased scrutiny.

Should he have been surprised when news of the Flight to Freedom reached him? Should he have been surprised Maeglin had incited not only all the Wood-elves on his mountain into fleeing, but hundreds of others in the outlaying farms and mines? Should he have been surprised that there had never been even a kernel of truth in Maeglin’s words: _I would dine with you, share a glass of wine, spar, spend time together. Call you friend._

It had been too great a gift, too radiant a hope, to be believed. Of course it had been a lie. There was no hope left. But Glorfindel clung to Maeglin’s words of forgiveness. That hadn’t been a lie. It had _not_. Glorfindel could not…and Maeglin had looked into his eyes and spoken with _sincerity_. He had. He had to have. He had. He _had_. 

Maeglin had no doubt been planning the Flight of Freedom for months, years, ahead of that moment between them. He had meant his forgiveness. His promises were the lies.

One piece of the Flight to Freedom jarred from the story of a prince leading some five thousand Wood-elves into freedom: Maeglin had left the Wood-elves serving in his city house behind. That plucked a note of discord in Glorfindel’s heart. Maeglin was not the kind of man to snatch his own freedom at the expense of others. And he must have known the Wood-elves of his House still trapped in the city would bear the weight of punishment. 

The news of the Flight of Freedom drove the Noldor into a state of panic and fury. They did not call it a Flight of Freedom, but the death of them all. And yet there was little talk of abandoning Gondolin. The idea of forsaking the ‘shelter’ of the mountain walls and venturing out in the open lands beyond, staggered and tongue-tied the Gondolindrim. The thought of all that land without a caging mountain wall in sight, and of course, the rumors of how it was nothing but a war-torn wasteland, cramped the Gondolindrim’s shoulders, and knotted their hands around their weapons in fear. No, they would not abandon the comfort of the familiar for the possibility of a more dangerous road.

Maeglin and the runway Wood-elves threatened the survival of the city the Gondolindrim clung to like a babe its cradle. Upon the House of the Wolf the Gondolindrim’s smote their wrath and fear. Glorfindel tried to buy Maeglin’s Wood-elves’ contracts, but riding high in the other lords’ memories was his gifting of his own Wood-elves to the House of the Wolf. Glorfindel was guilty by association, and could do nothing. All he ever accomplished was nothing.

The House of the Wolf’s Wood-elves were an undesirable commodity for all Houses that did not wish to savor the punishment. Their heads had no doubt been stuffed with rebellious ideas needing to be stamped out before they infected the other Wood-elves. Penlod, Egalmoth, and Tuor divided the lot between them. 

Glorfindel did not want to think about what Tuor wanted with the Wood-elves. Tuor had been silent on the practice of Gondolin’s slavery, but when offered lands by Turgon when Tuor established the House of the Wing, Tuor refused them with a charming smile but steel in his eyes. What did he want with Wood-elves now? Glorfindel’s gut clenched. Tuor _hated_ Maeglin.

Talk turned to gobbling up the lands of the House of the Wolf, and tearing down the city house that had served as a hotbed for rebellion, unmaking it to the last stone. Glorfindel could not abide another moment in this city. Before he left for the mountain patrol he did not ever want to come back from, he visited the House of the Wolf for the first and only time.

The house had been looted and desecrated. After the guards had come crashing in and dragged the Wood-elves out, the Gondolindrim wrecked their wrath into it. Thieves had stolen most of the furniture and goods, but much also lay shattered on the floor. 

The entry hall reeked with the acidic scent of piss. The kitchen was a mess of white flour and bugs. Maeglin’s forge had been pillaged. What works of beauty had ugly hands seized? 

Glorfindel found what he thought had been Maeglin’s room. The bed frame had been looted, but the mattress lay a ruin of knife slashes and burst down. Every valuable had been stripped from the room. 

A sketchbook lay torn to shreds on the floor. He picked one of the loose, torn pages up. Half a sword sketched into the parchment. He traced the lines of charcoal. It would have been beautiful. He let the sketch fall from his hand, fluttering down onto the floor.

As he moved to walk out the door, a glint of blue caught his eye. Kicked into a corner, a single earring lay. He picked it up. The lapis lazuli shone in the room’s weak sunlight. The design was unique and remarkable, but decidedly non-Noldorin, which was why Maeglin had never worn it to one of the King’s Banquets, Glorfindel guessed.

Glorfindel cast his gaze around the room. He thought about the Wood-elves who had been taken from this place with violence and cruel hands, dragged out into the street and hauled away to await the auctioneers’ block that would sell a slip of paper and think because they called it a contract and not a chained body, they were not selling and buying human flesh. He thought about the man he’d watched for years from a distance, admiring, respecting, seeing so much of Fingon and Fingolfin in the goodness of his heart and the strength of his shoulders that others could climb onto. Maeglin was a good, honorable man, and he loved his people. He would not have seized freedom and left them to bare the whip of the Gondolindrim’s vengeance.

But if Maeglin had not been the instigator for the Flight to Freedom, where was he? But Glorfindel already knew. The Wood-elves had run because they knew what the Gondolindrim hadn’t cared enough about Maeglin to see: Maeglin hadn’t come back from the mines because he was already dead.

*

Maeglin crept back into Gondolin the way he’d come all those years ago with his mother: up the Hidden Way. 

(His mother’s hand folded delicate as a wadding bird’s wing in his. She looked back at him, her body haloed by the light of her Fëanorion Lamp. Her eyes looked like they contained whole galaxies inside their irises, so brilliant was the Tree Light and her _fëa_. The freedom rode heady in her mouth. He smiled back at her, but anxiety knuckled his gut. Maybe they should just wait for Father.) 

When they took him before Turgon and questioned him on his absence. They could not see the marks of his torment. Morgoth had glamoured them all away.

(Screams sticking to the insides of his lungs, throat—did he have a throat anymore? It felt like they’d burned it away in the fire, the brands smoking against his skin, the scent of burning flesh. Did he have a mouth to scream out of? Hadn’t they sliced off his lips, or was that the feel of their fangs puncturing them when they—don’t think about that. He was Maeglin Starchild. Maeglin Starchild. His home smelt like pine and cedar, and all was soft, subtle twilight curled around him in a lover’s embrace. His father— The creak of swinging hinges, boots on the stones, coming back. No. Please…)

He did not know what he answered, where he said he’d been. He might have said something about seeking home, wandering, looking for Celebrimbor? Turgon was a washed-out painting, Gondolin a landscape watercolor left out in the rain, all the colors blobbing together. Voices spoke to him from the other end of a long, dark throat.

He floated underwater. All was quiet and dark, entombed in the sea. Shapes shifted on the surface like the passing shadows of ships, but the world blurred, bending like light through the water. It was so hard to listen to their voices, focus on their faces, why would he want to? In here, he didn’t have to feel anything at all. No more pain, even the hate washed away. 

Why had he ever cared so much? He used to hate them, hate them so much the hatred bled through his teeth, hate them so much he dreamt of them. Dreamt of dragging lions into the alleyways that had once played host to blood on the thighs and the sound of his strangulation on his father’s necklace, and in the dreams he’d bash the lions’ heads against the too-white stones. 

The hatred was gone now. He wasn’t quite sure he was still alive. Maybe this was all a trick of Morgoth’s and his body was still lying broken in an Angband cell –alone, in agony, and Lost in the dark.

He heard Turgon’s voice from a long, dark tunnel, telling him his house had been demolished, his people sold off like cattle to the highest bidder, nothing left. Maeglin smiled. Soon. Justice came with the dawn. It almost had the corpse king in its rattlesnake grip now. 

The corpse king told him he could lie back down in the bed of grief with the scent of tears clinging to it. There was no more Nídon to sing the stars to him. If he lay down in that bed, it would swallow him whole in blackness. Maeglin sunk down deeper into the sea, until the pain floated away.

They took him to the rooms the scent of grief clung to. There were two lions standing guard at the door. (They had _killed_ him.) He smiled at them. Soon. Dawn was coming. 

He went into the rooms pain screamed out of all the shadowed corners of. There: where they walled his mind with diamond, trapped him inside, and made him watch as they _killed_ him. There: where the corpse king sneered at the work of his father’s hands, and twisted his arm behind his back until the bone snapped and he took the work of his father’s hands off. There: the bed he’d suffocated in for months and months after they _killed_ him.

He lay down on the floor, curled into ball, and kept all the lamps lit so they would not find him in the dark. Only they did find him. They had never lost his scent. It was theirs now. He’d sold it to them.

Plunge deeper, down, down into cold depths, nothing down here but silence. He didn’t have to feel anymore.

He dreamt: the scent of a forge, his father’s hand on his shoulder, his father’s dark eyes smiling down at him. His mother’s silvery laughter, the way her arms curled him up around her—

The clang of chains, laughter in the circling dark as they came for him. No. Please—

Hours? Days? He knew no hunger or thirst down here in the ocean’s depths. He had already died. 

He walked through white streets and sunlight that stung his eyes. He walked to only-home-left, to fountain bubbling, trees Legolas learned how to swing upon, grass spread with blankets caring all the colors of the rainbow, and voices singing in the language of stars. He found: no home, walls, torn down, new flowers planted, new paths paved, and Golodhrim infecting the sanctuary that was no sanctuary anymore with their stench. They walked over the place he’d worked side-by-side with Celebrimbor, but there was nothing left of the forge. A rose bush grew in its place. The House of the Wolf had been erased.

 _Soon._ Dawn would find them, riding in on a herd of galloping white horses, and mounted upon its breast would be Fingon and the bright helms and swords of his Noldor, the turning of the tide. They would come. And the streets of the corpse city would run red. Justice.

He returned to the room of grief, and lay himself down upon the bed to wait for the dawn’s rising. He floated in a sea of silent, dark waters. He fled but could not hide from hands reaching out to claw at his hips, fangs sinking into his skin, laugher, black and coarse, no, please—

His mother played with his fingers, fitting the shape of hers with his child-slim ones. _Do you want to hear a story, my little prince?_ Maeglin looking up from his head’s resting place on her shoulder to smile a quiet smile, _Will you tell me the one about Uncle Fingon and Cousin Maedhros? When Uncle Fingon was the bravest of all and saved Cousin Maedhros from the Dark?_

 _Look, Father! Finwë has saved the village and driven the Orcs away!_ Father picked up Finwë and walked him up Maeglin’s leg. Maeglin giggled. _And where was Maeglin? Finwë needs his best warrior there at his side._ Maeglin laughed when Finwë tapped him on the nose, Father smiling behind him. _Finwë is the **king** , Father. He can kill all the Orcs all by himself._

A cool cloth pressed into his brow, “Maeglin? Maeglin?” 

Eyes cracked open, a face he’d thought lost with all the other’s when the Golodhrim fought over them like slabs of meat, highest-bidder hauling the prized sow away. “You came.”

“Of course I came. I am sorry I could not come sooner, but my contract was sold to Lord Penlod’s House in the city, and its Head of Household keeps a strict eye on us.”

“Legolas?”

Her face creased with pain, hand squeezing his down to the bones. “They took my son away. They _hated_ that he had lived a life free of their boot. They sold his contract to Lord Egalmoth. He works in the felids. He does not have a kind overseer or lord, and the field is miles from the city walls. He passes out with exhaustion every night on the wagons.”

Maeglin needed the sea, where was the sea? He needed to go far, far away. Why had she come to unearth him when he’d already been dead? She shouldn’t have dug up the corpse.

“But now you are returned to us, Maeglin! I thought—we _grieved_. And Nídon? Where is Nídon?”

“Dead.” They were all dead. 

What did any of it matter? Die here, die a hundred years later, it would all amount to nothing in the end. Morgoth would have found Gondolin. He would have. He _would_. If it hadn’t been Maeglin who told him, it just would have been someone else, or Orc spies would have pushed deep enough into the mountains one day, or a bird enslaved to the Dark would have flown over the valley and reported back to its lord. And if not dead in Gondolin, dead a few years later. There was no escape. It was only a matter of time before the Dark God slew the world.

“Dead? How? What happened, what—and you? You would not have left us of your own free will, not when you knew what fate awaited us. What happened to you?”

He stared into her face, a face he’d sold with all the rest. She searched his, eyes worried, pleading, what happened? Tell me what is wrong? Maeglin? She looked for a man who no longer existed. He was just a body stuffed with despair and shame. 

He turned his face away, unable to bear her eyes. She had always looked at him like he had the power to save them all, such _light_ inside her eyes, such hope. The truth would stab the light from her eyes. He could not bear for her to know what he had done, and yet, even though they were all already corpses and there would be no exodus of his people dancing through the fields, voices lifted in Star-song, she deserved so much better than the death that crept into the doorway, watching them with eyes that dripped the venom of corruption’s genesis. 

“Dawn is coming.”

“Maeglin?”

“Dawn is coming, and when it comes, it comes with blood.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dawn’s rising. You will know when it comes. It will paint the sky red. When the day comes, you must take Legolas and the others and flee to the caves. You must spread the word in the District: Dawn is coming, and it comes red with death, flee, flee to the caves.”

“I do not underst—”

Maeglin sunk down, down deep into the quiet, shadowed waters. They closed over him with the finality of a coffin’s lid nailing into place. It was best to keep the dead buried, or their stench infected the lungs of the living. 

*

Dawn rode in on the blare of trumpets and shouts on the wall that sliced through the revelry of the Gates of Summer festival that had been like a wedding celebration in a graveyard, like a corpse made up for a dance. Maeglin had been submerged deep inside the coffin of the sea, his body sat in the graveyard among the rest, a painted corpse the corpse king had called out to play, when the alarm sounded. Screams, tables overturned, the panic of a mob caught outside the city gates and stampeding towards them, trampling bodies, spilling the first blood that day.

The guards rounded the white-eyed rabbits into order with shield walls, and began hustling the Golodhrim back into the city, abandoning the graveyard festivities on the valley floor. The Wood-elves were pushed into the back, lives accounted cheap and expendable.

Maeglin had not moved from his seat. He sat as one pinned by a spear. The sea had beached him. There was no sea left, no denial, no _dawn is coming_ and justice with her, just: death and traitors and broken in the dark. He had _killed_ them al—but he’d fought, hadn’t he? He hadn’t meant to, but it had hurt so much, and then it wouldn’t hurt anymore if he just—and he broke, and he Lost himself, and he babbled to eyes that carried the seed of all evil in their black, black pupils.

What did it matter that he fought and defied if in the end he broke? 

Celebeth’s face. Legolas.’ Every Wood-elf in his House he’d promised to protect. Every Wood-elf who spent years and years in slavery and now would end in violent death. Glorfindel’s face. Eärendil’s innocent child one.

He had sold them all because he had been too weak to endure.

He stood up. He walked to the Wood-elves shoved like so many cattle to the back of the herd. He grabbed one’s attention, and said, “Flee to the caves.” Understanding lit in the man’s eyes. He turned to pass the words on. Maeglin went to the next and the next: flee to the caves, the caves, the caves.

Would they have time? Maybe if these Golodhrim were not thrusting the Wood-elves like sacrifices in their place at the coming Dark army. To the next Maeglin added: “Go now! Scale the walls. It does not matter anymore if the Golodhrim discover our secret paths.” The woman nodded, and snatched the hand of the Wood-elf beside her, shouting, ‘Run for the walls!’ 

The outer wall closing in around the Wood-elves’ District was neither as high, nor as well-made as the one encircling Gondolin. The Wood-elves had long discovered ways of sneaking in and out of the District. The problem was the sheer numbers. Would they all scale them in time, and what of the long trek up to the caves?

Maeglin scanned the mountains. The signal had come from the west. Glorfindel’s people patrolled the western mountains. And there, even now, Maeglin spied a flash of gold ridding down the feet of the mountain at the head of a column of mounted knights. But there, only a few leagues above on the mountain trail, poured the first dots of the Dark Army, like a swarm of flies from a dead man’s mouth. And there, higher and cloaked in shadow but for the flame of their eyes and whips, shaking the mountain side with their monstrous footsteps: Balrogs.

Maeglin shouted into the mass of Wood-elves: _Run, run, for the walls! Flee to the caves!_ His voice cracked like a thunderclap, racing down spines, reaching ears that had not yet heard the message passed from mouth-to-mouth. Like a flock of birds in flight, the Wood-elves sprinted, splitting around the herd of Golodhrim like the sea before a ship’s prow. The Golodhrim guards did not have the manpower to restrain them, and gave up the effort to try once they saw the Wood-elves were not seeking to press through the gates before the Golodhrim, but climbing the walls on paths the Wood-elves had mapped for centuries.

From the high walls a second round of trumpet blasts sounded. Dragons were sighted on the eastern mountains, coming at the head of a second Dark Army. Panic surged again, a second tidal wave, but the Golodhrim did not stampede again, most had breached the gates now, and ran through the city to their homes, seeking what weapons and false safety they could find there. Clumped around the base of the walls, the Wood-elves began scaling up on ropes cast down by the first climbers, but thousands still pressed against the walls, stranded on the valley floor.

Golodhrim cried out to Ulmo to save them, cursed the runway Moriquendi for betraying them, Turgon for not leading them to safety, and Morgoth and his foul army. Someone spotted Maeglin, stabbed a finger at him and shouted: _There, the Traitor! We are all going to die because of him and those cursed Moriquendi!_

Maeglin would not have raised a hand to defend himself as they beat him to death, but the Wood-elves closed ranks around him, and swung back at the Golodhrim mob rushing forward like vultures with outstretched talons. The coming Dark Army was forgotten, all that mattered was tearing each other to pieces, centuries of oppression and hate erupting under the pressurizer of terror. 

Only a third trumpet blast put an end to the bloodshed. Calls of _cowards!_ followed the blast. Salgant’s House of jailers that had the sole duty of defending the Hidden Way, had fled their posts, escaping out the Hidden Way to the free lands beyond. The scum of Gondolin, the den of lions, would be the only ones to survive. What mockery of justice, what a dark, dark dawn rising.

The Golodhrim mob rushed back to the gates, squeezing inside, leaving trampled Golodhrim and Wood-elves bodies on the valley floor. The gates slammed shut behind the last of the Golodhrim. Thousands of Wood-elves had been sealed out. The Dark Army had breached the valley floor. _Climb, climb!_

They would not make it. Dragon-fire scorched the fields of crops, the footsteps of Balrogs quaked the valley floor, the flies swarmed closer, closer to the corpse city, come to feast on dead flesh. Wood-elves cried out to the Golodhrim guards on the gates and the walls filling with Golodhrim soldiers. They begged and cursed and wept. They received no mercy. They were ignored, insignificant pests. The Golodhrim were far too busy securing the city, and shouting orders of defense to listen to the voices of those they’d condemned to die at the gates.

And there some seven thousand Wood-elves would have been slaughter before the walls even fell, but galloping up the flat road from the west came Glorfindel’s mounted company. The gates groaned open to let them pass, but while the Golodhrim would have shut them behind them, Glorfindel, golden and shinning bright as the sun, rebuked them in a voice ringing with a beauty far too pure for this city of corpses. 

The Golodhrim bowed to the orders of the Lord of the House of the Golden Flower, who seemed a prince of light in that moment, radiant with nobility shining like a star on his fair brow. The gates did not close again until not one Wood-elf was left stranded and condemned to death on the valley floor.

Maeglin walked through the gates, but did not turn aside to follow the Wood-elves into the District and flee with them to the caves. There was no hiding, no flight from what he had done. There was only death, and choosing how he would meet it. 

He walked through the Main Gates into Gondolin, intent on heading straight down the King’s Way towards the palace where he’d left his sword and armor. The Main Gate mobbed with confusion, barked orders, and running soldiers, but through it he caught sight of Glorfindel mounted on his white horse, his skin seeming to glow with golden light. There was a moment their eyes met, and Glorfindel’s widened, lips parting. He looked like he meant to fight his way through to Maeglin’s side. Maeglin could not bear it. He ducked deeper into the crowd and fled from the face he’d sold, the man he’d killed.

The Dark Army reached the city before he gained his chambers (the ones across from Mother’s, the ones that smelt like grief). The Balrogs pounded on the gates. Even the skill of his craftsmanship could only last so long before the hell-fire melted holes through the steel. The Dragons were already at feast-table. They’d climbed the shorter walls circling the Wood-elves District and banqueted on Maeglin’s people, roaring fire that crisped flesh, and crushing skulls between their jaws. 

Maeglin stood at the balcony doors of his bedroom, watching the city burn, the Orcs piled over the walls on their siege machines, the defenders unable to keep out the sheer magnitude of their numbers. The entire city was caught in madness, and some were so desperate to escape they flung themselves from high windows and the battlements to avoid the terrible fate they would suffer if captured. Every scream was a knife to his chest, until he’d been knifed to death a second time and fell down, down into the dark throat of the sea.

He took out his father’s Galvorn armor and Anguirel. Morgoth had handed them back to him with eyes that smirked with all Maeglin’s secrets inside, and the taste of Maeglin on that black tongue, pieces of his skin still buried under those nails. But he didn’t have to think about it down here in the sea. The pain was over. He’d let it go, flying so high and free, his ruined body left far below, his daggered and grief-torn heart swallowed by the jaws of numbness, floating away into nothingness. 

He buckled on his father’s armor. The Galvorn whispered to him of hunger and feeding. He would have indulged it, but this coffin only had room for one body, and that body only had the strength for one more deed: its own destruction. 

He wrapped his fingers around Anguirel’s hilt and lifted her. She latched onto his intent, and slithered the hiss of letting her drink his blood if he was so eager to spill it. Let it not go to waste on the rocks. But there was only one death he’d wanted since the moment they killed his father, only one death he dreamed of: jumping after his father’s body, arms outstretched, their hands meeting on the way down, they eyes locked, minds entwined in an galaxy of love, hitting the rocks together, dying together, his father’s arms around him. That death was years too late, but at least he would die where his father had.

He walked out of the rooms that had never been _his_ rooms, only the territory of grief. He walked out of the prison palace, and through the corpse streets now splattered with real corpses. The defenders still fought the Dark Army on the walls, but death had been led into the heart of the city by the hand, as despair and terror struck its lance through chests and Quendi chose suicide, a quick fall from a rooftop. Maeglin walked to the wall overlooking the sheer cliff faces of the Caragdûr his father’s body had broken upon.

As he neared the walls, the fighting intensified, Orcs poured over them, the Golodhrim defenders overwhelmed. Not long now. Maeglin slew what Orcs attacked him, Anguirel singing, but did not rush to the city’s defense. It was already over.

At the base of the wall, before climbing the set of stairs cut into it, he stopped, for there in their shadow was little Eärendil. The boy had a dagger in his hand and was trying to hold back the Orcs encircling him. The boy would be dead already if the Orcs didn’t enjoy their fun so much.

The boy would be dead soon, they all would, but…Maeglin’s feet ran forward anyway and hr dispatched the Orcs in a few slices. As he pulled his sword from the sucking flesh of the last, a small body crashed against his legs, wrapping skinny arms around his thighs and digging little fingernails into the fabric of his leggings.

He started down at the head of golden curls, his bloody sword hanging from his hand, his mind far away, and yet when the little face tilted up to him, tear streaked, eyes blue like the first sky he’d ever seen, huge with terror but also _trust_ , sweet innocence not yet crushed under the heel of indoctrination, Maeglin bent and scooped the boy up with one arm, the other never relinquishing his sword. Eärendil wrapped his legs around Maeglin’s waist, and hid his face in the crook of Maeglin’s neck, as if he believed inside Maeglin’s arms he had found shelter. 

(Father snatched him out of the bedcovers, and put him into his lap, wrapping his arms around him. Shock held Lómion perfectly still for one frozen moment. Father’s arms were strong, and his hand large as it stroked through his hair. Lómion was not afraid anymore. Father would keep him safe. Lómion flung his arms around Father’s neck, and squeezed tight. 

“You are safe now,” Father said, so gently, his Breglos-voice. Father wouldn’t let those eyes eat Lómion. Father would protect him.)   
Maeglin tightened his grip on the boy, feeling the tremors shudder through Eärendil’s skeleton. “Orcs came, and I couldn’t find Momma!” Eärendil started sobbing. 

“Hush, now, hush,” his lips pressed into those wild curls. He kept a firm hold on the boy as he climbed the stairs, up to the lip of the wall. No Orcs accosted them; this section of the wall had not been overrun, for no siege tower could scale the towering height of the cliffs.

Maeglin reached his destination and looked down. The fall was immense and final. The end waited for him, close now. But what to do about the boy? 

“Eärendil!” He turned at the scream, the boy held tight against his chest. Idril ran towards them, arms outstretched. “Give me my son!” 

Maeglin’s eyes slid right over her to trap inside the ones of the Golodh guard at her shoulder. The Golodh had his naked sword in his hand, but all Maeglin could see was the death in his eyes. The death of a long, long fall with Maeglin’s scream of anguish locked inside the box of his throat, behind a wall of diamond.

He knew that animal face. He knew those eyes of death. He knew those murderer’s hands. This Golodh had grabbed his father’s arm on one side, and dragged him to the walls, and his father had cried: _Look at me!_ A hurricane of despair ravaged his father’s words on their way up his throat. He needed Maeglin to look, and Maeglin was trying so _hard_ to reach him, but his mind had never been strong enough when it mattered most. 

He’d stayed locked inside a tomb of diamond as this Golodh tossed his father over the wall like a piece of trash. They’d _killed_ him. And then they’d laughed. And then they passed whispers from mouth-to-mouth in the diseased kisses of whores that named his father an Orc. They mocked his father’s torment in black pits of despair where he battled the genesis of evil, and lost pieces of himself in the battle, but was not _broken_. They sneered at his father and smeared his name with the Darkness he had fought against with every breath in his bones. He had been the strongest, most beautiful person Maeglin had ever—and they _killed_ him. And they _laughed_. And they laughed. And they laughed.

“Are you laughing now?” his voice torn from his throat in the scream of a hurricane, drowning out the scream of the body he thrust over the walls, its nails scrambled into the skin of his hands as he held it by a fist of its tunic.

“Don’t you dare hurt my son! I swear by the Valar as my witness, if you harm him I will _kill_ you!”

“You are not laughing, is it not amusing anymore? Not the best show in town?” Shouts, a child’s sobbing, little fingers twisting on his wrist. “I thought Orcs like watching a good show. They like to play with their food first. You enjoy _playing_.” Blood on thighs. Hands groping bodies the tongues had been cut out of so they could not say no. “Was it fun? Did you laugh when she screamed like you laughed when you killed him?” Nightmares he would _never_ unfeel: claws on his hips, the way he _begged_ — “You liked laughing when you played with me! I made such _good_ entertainment!”

Steel bit into the crook of his throat. “Get your hands off my son.” A voice like the cold wrath of a winter blizzard. “Let him go or I will sever your spine, Traitor.”

Maeglin did not turn, did not hear or see or know anything but the huge, terrified blue eyes staring up at him from where he dangled that fragile bird-boned body out over space, nothing but a long, long drop into death underneath those little feet that had wanted to know what it felt like to fly. A little sparrow, an ethereal creature with the sun pouring into his golden curls, and a face tilted up to his with trust. 

Trust shattered, only terror left. Eärendil never should have trusted. Didn’t he know Maeglin had blackened into a Golodh long, long ago?

Maeglin pulled the boy back. The boy shook and cringed against his chest as he slid the boy down to his feet, terrified of the monster touching him. Maeglin watched as the sobbing boy ran into his mother’s arms. 

Maeglin did not lift Anguirel as he turned. He stood open and defenseless, and welcomed Tuor’s blade when it plunged into his body. The pain was incredible, and yet nothing, nothing at all compared to what he’d already endured. So much pain, but all for nothing, for he’d broken and Lost himself in the dark. Maybe the Maeglin who babbled faces and faces and faces to the eyes of malice hadn’t even been him, not him at all. There was no Maeglin anymore, just tiny pieces of what he’d once been, little shards of glass scattered about the wasteland where Maeglin should have been. Maybe they had been a person once, but no longer. 

He fell, tipped off the end of Tuor’s sword like so much garbage. Down down down. The rocks opened hungry jaws to catch him. He’d dreamed of these rocks. He shared death with his father, and almost felt the warmth of his father’s fingers linked with his.

The soul that disentangled from his _hröa_ was a soiled thing indeed, and so lost and broken. It was nothing but a wounded wisp of soul, and had not the strength to flight the cold noose that circled around its neck and lassoed it in. Its struggle to free itself and go _home_ were like the feeble last fight of a rabbit caught between a wolf’s jaws.

The soul was yanked West towards shores it had never known, far, far from home. It would never know the warmth of its father’s arms again, or the cradle of soft twilight, or the sweetness of Breglos’ kiss, only the Golodh’s Death God’s idea of justice. But then, home belonged to Maeglin Starchild, and Maeglin Starchild no longer existed, only a Golodh wearing his face. So was not an eternity inside another prison cell exactly what he deserved? 

And into a prison cell they stuffed him, but as the door slammed shut on his Kinslayer soul (for had he not killed faces upon faces?), he turned and found he would not have to serve his prison sentence alone. A glowing soul of white light flew to him and clasped the aching, lost pieces of himself to her chest. He sighed with brokenness as vast as the sea, and rushed towards her like the waves reached for the shore, clinging back: Mother.

*

Gondolin burned behind them. The city was lost and Turgon dead in his tower, too stubborn to listen to his daughter’s pleas to come with them. Or maybe it was shame that kept him there. Glorfindel couldn’t say he cared. 

Behind them the valley that had once rolled green now stained black with the horde of Orcs. Gondolin was a burning flame at its heart. Before them lay escape, a life outside Gondolin’s encircling walls. Freedom. His mouth twisted with bitter irony. So he would get his wish, and the price was only tens of thousands of souls. It was enough to make him sick. 

Idril and Tuor led the way at the head of the fleeing column, but the climb was steep this far into the mountains, and they were all too exhausted to run. Idril’s paranoia and superstitions against Maeglin had led her to build the tunnel. Glorfindel might have laughed, but it would have tasted like blood on his teeth. 

He hadn’t been able to find Maeglin in the madness after that one brief glimpse that punched through his lungs: alive. Maeglin was _alive_. Glorfindel clung to the thin thread of hope that Maeglin had been one of the Elves who’d escaped over the valley floor in the chaos after the Main Gates’ breaching. He’d seen some thousands fighting their way towards the Hidden Way. 

The city’s defense had been scattered from the first, with shouted orders contradiction other orders and soldiers running about leaderless trying to find their House in the confusion. With civilians pouring into the streets, causing more mayhem, the defenders found it nearly impossible to protect their city. The soldiers of Gondolin had never once drilled for this possibility. There were no places sectioned off on the walls for this House and that one should the city come under attack. 

A roar that was nothing like a bear’s and very much like the sound of a forest fire when the wind became its ally, came from their backs. It was followed by the slap of iron-shod feet against the rocky cliff pass, and the shouts of Orcs spitting foul curses and gloating on their coming fun.

Idril called from the front, “We must fly!”

The band of weary refugees broke into a run, following their princess and Tuor. Their calves and thighs burned, their lungs gasped in the thinning air, but no matter how hard they pushed themselves, the sounds of pursuit continued. Glorfindel, who guarded the rear, thought they might be putting some distance between the Orcs and their flight, but that other sound, the sound of wind and fire, grew louder.

They were closing on the pass’s zenith. But as he looked back, he saw they would not make it. Shadow and flame followed. It was a Balrog, and it was closing fast. Its eyes were points of pure hate, and its flaming flesh so hot Glorfindel could feel its heat against his skin even from this distance. 

He turned to face it. It wasn’t really a question of heroic sacrifice. He either killed the demon or they all died. 

It stood at least ten feet high. With one clawed hand it held a flaming sword and in the other a fire-whip. Its chest, calves, and forearms were covered in a black metal that seemed to suck in all light until, though the beast was birthed from flame and carried fire within its core, it walked in shadow.

Glorfindel lifted his sword. The fleeing Elves realized what was happening now, and looked back in terror, quailing at the Balrog’s terrible visage. But Tuor snatched up Glorfindel’s sacrifice, and pushed the wavering Elves on. They didn’t have time to watch the battle’s outcome. Glorfindel would purchase them time with his life, and it would be an ill-used sacrifice if they squandered it by loitering to gawk. 

Tuor drove them on, Idril a hard diamond beside him. Her son was clutched to her chest as if she wanted to melt their two bodies together, and her voice clear and strong as she led her people. It was strange, that surrounded by fire, he should be remained of ice. 

Glorfindel saw again Fingolfin’s face and Fingon’s as they fed their people hope and strength across the Helcaraxë. He saw Elenwë’s face as her fingers slipped and scrambled for a hold on the treacherous ice while the arctic river dragged at her skirts and desperately kicking legs. Soon, he would join them in death. 

He received many wounds, his flesh burned and blistered on his sword arm so that it was agony to heft it, but in the end he drove the blade into the Balrog’s heart and watched it fall. It seemed, for a moment, that he might live to see the other side of these mountains after so many years of longing. But then a black claw tangled in his hair and pulled him to his death.

The drop from the cliff ledge was terrifyingly long, so long it seemed the greater torture to delay the inevitable with this endless moment when the wind hallowed his ears and he had nothing to do but watch the retreating sky and think on the coming impact.

He didn’t want to reflect back on his life, on all the things he should have done, all the mistakes he wished he could unmake, because in the end he felt nothing but regret. If he could do this over again…If he just had one more chance…

One more chance and he wouldn’t choose the same. He’d go back to that young boy he’d been, before he’d learned to manage his faces, and tell him that hiding was a curse. You hide because you are ashamed, so you learn how to deceive, to cover up the constant fear of your shame being unmasked. If he could chose again he would have never worn any face but his own.

He’d learned his faces so well he had everyone fooled. They looked at the face he’d constructed and saw someone to admired, instead of the scarred boy hiding underneath. But everyday he became a little less alive, until he’d wore the faces so long he’d forgotten where he’d put his real one.

But he’d never forgotten or forgiven what Irimë had done it him. How could him? It was a hurt so deep and old, like a young sapling that had had its first branches cut off, and while it may continuing to live, it would be forever stunted. 

He had not had the strength to forgive what she’d done to him. So he died now, still ensnared in the past; a little boy all alone in the dark with nothing but hate and shame against the bitter loneliness his life had amounted to.

If only he had one more chance…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I got the idea of the Wood-elves hiding in the caves from this quote about Maeglin’s House during the fall of Gondolin: most of his people were "smitten and driven to fly into what dark holes they might." It implies some of his House survived the fall of Gondolin, and I wanted to explore that idea.


	57. Chapter 45

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 45

Year 428 First Age, border of Nan Elmoth

They’d chosen to make camp within the shelter of the tree line, as was only wise. The plains stretching out form the dark eaves of the forest were flat and open, exposed. Orcs didn’t often slip through the watchful swords of the son’s of Fëanor, but wolves and other beasts roamed the lands freely.

Finrod pulled the feathers off one of the fowls he’d shot for tonight’s supper. The branches creaked overhead as if they had eyes to watch and ears to hear. Nan Elmoth was nothing like Doriath. Its magic was deep and alien. It was completely divorced from Melian’s magic that ran through all of Doriath and forbid not only creatures of the Enemy’s entrance, but Noldor and the new-come Men as well.

Finrod glanced up from his work when he heard the tell-tale snap of twigs marking Brandir approach. He sighed at the Man’s utter lack of wood-craft even after four years under Elven tutorage. At least he’d found the stream, which for Brandir was saying much.

Brandir set the filled pot of water over the cracking fire with a grunt, and threw himself on the ground. “This place is full of sorcery! I swear some of the trees moved!”

Finrod’s mouth twitched. “It is said Nan Elmoth was once home to an Elf with no-small skill in magic.”

“Not more than the Elves of Nargothrond,” Brandir said with all the confidence of a young man. “They walk as the shadows, not even the Enemy himself would be able to slip passed their guards and discover the hidden paths into Nargothrond!” 

Finrod found the Adan’s confidence in his people’s skill both charming and alarming. It did not do to be overconfident. “There are many Elves more skilled,” he cautioned. “You have just not met them.”

“Well, if they are more skilled yet, I probably never will. I’d walk right passed them without even knowing,” Brandir said honestly, pride not blinding him to his weaknesses. 

Brandir rose from his resting place to sit beside Finrod and assist in the task of preparing their meal. “We shall eat well tonight,” he grinned. “When I go home I’ll teach my people how to bake the Lembas cakes. All the bread they gave us in Dorthonion has gone stale! Why haven’t any of my people learned such a useful skill before?” he asked, falling into the old role of mentor and student that occurred less and less between them as Brandir grew surer of his own mind and body.

“It is a skill I once tried to teach Bëor, but though I have attempted to impart the secret of Lembas to many of your forefathers and mothers, none have been able to achieve the bread’s long life. I have concluded only Elven hands can bake a true waybread.” 

Bëor had been the first Edain Finrod befriended, and the leader of the first Men to come over the mountains. Bëor had followed Finrod back to Nargothrond; he’d left home and people, wife and children, all to follow Finrod. 

Finrod had fostered Brandir since the Adan was a youth of fifteen, as he had fostered Brandir’s father and grandfather all the way back to Bëor’s sons. He had begun the tradition for Bëor who had given up everything for him, and could not regret it for he still remembered the light in Bëor’s eyes when he’d welcomed his youngest son to Nargothrond with a father’s eager embrace. But the lives of Men were short, and Finrod watched a troop of youths with Bëor’s warm brown eyes, black curls, and deep voice come and go. 

Soon now, Brandir would leave and return to Dorthonion. He would marry, have children, and send one of his sons south to Nargothrond for Finrod to foster. 

Finrod sighed, throwing the meat he’d chopped into the boiling water. They sat in silence while the meat stewed, tossing some herbs and wild roots into the pot. Finrod judged the sun to be near its setting, but it was impossible to say with certainty when the dark branches lanced their leafy fingers over them and blocked out sight of the sky. Finrod cast a glace into the deeper wood, wondering, curious. 

He’d spoken lightly to Brandir of the rumors he’d heard of these woods. But the truth was far heavier, a tale carrying great sorrow for the House of Finwë. Here Aredhel had met the Elf who would later kill her. Finrod knew only what Fingolfin had imparted, and this had come secondhand from Turgon. To hear Turgon talk one would think Aredhel had lain with an Orc and been kept in a dungeon only to be taken out at this Eöl’s pleasure. But if even _Curufin_ had contradicted this, saying the Elf had been ‘sulking and sun-shy’ but no monster, then Finrod could put little weight in Turgon’s tale.

His eyes sought the darkness under boughs, wondering what he’d find if he walked deeper into this long forbidden forest. What enchantments Eöl had placed about his home had long since fallen with his death, and now nothing but old superstitions stood between the heart of Nan Elmoth and those brave enough to wander within.

These were thoughts for the sun’s dawning though. The stew was ready, and their bellies empty. Discovering what lay in the forest’s heart would wait for morning.

Brandir helped himself to a generous serving, and split a loaf of the stale bread between them. But the Man did not begin shoveling the stew into his mouth. For all Brandir had not taken to the wood-craft the Elves had tried to instill in him, he had adopted many of Nargothrond’s customs.

Other men would have skipped the Rites of Board in the wilderness, but Brandir had always been unusually faithful in his reverence. He pressed his fist to his brow and bent his head, offering a posture of supplication before The One as he sent up his prayer: “Merciful All Father, bless this meal we are about to partake. Let the bread nourish our bodies, and the meat of your birds strengthen us so that we might fight the Darkness without faltering. Receive our thanks and honor, and guard our hearts against doubt and fear. May the flame of _estel_ burn ever bight in our hearts, and never waver.”

Finrod remained quiet while Brandir gave the Rites, offering up no prayer of his own. He held his tongue when Brandir (and many of his people) chose to express their devotion and servitude to The One, but he did not agree with it. 

In Valinor, the Eldar had lived under the Valar’s laws. Worship of the Valar was expected, even demanded, and became heavy with rituals. Everywhere there were people ready to condemn and judge if you did not uphold the observances and offer loud, long-winded prayers to the Valar for all to note your holiness. 

Belief in The One had started out with a small band of Elves starving for an alternative to the self-righteous piety and forced adulation Valinor had become saturated with. The One’s worshipers grew slowly in Valinor where they were oppressed and ridiculed, and even threatened, but gained wings after the Valar turned their backs on the Noldor and fenced Valinor against them. 

The Eldar were accustomed to offering up material sacrifices, and observing rigid rituals as expressions of worship. So they had taken their understanding of veneration and adapted it to their new beliefs. Thus ceremonies like the Right of Board had been formed, a cousin to a ritual of Valar worship where Yavanna was thanked at table for the bounty. 

With the Rites over, Brandir dug into his meal with the healthy appetite of one who had spent the day in travel. Finrod ate silently beside him.

The silence did not last long, Brandir soon engaged in speculation on the coming birth of his cousin’s child, wondering (as it seemed he’d been doing every night for the last month) if it would prove a boy. They spoke long of Dorthonion and the rule of Brandir’s great-grandfather Boromir. Finrod found himself speaking of Boromir and his father Boron, Bëor’s grandson, when they’d been fosterling of Brandir’s age; Brandir was eager as always for tales of his kin and people. 

When they had both eaten their fill, they washed out the dishware and poured what remained of the stew into the bushes for scavengers to feast on. They spread out their sleeping rolls and sought the land of dreams. Finrod lay gazing at the lofty tree heads, trying to see if he could pick out a star through the dense foliage, until Brandir’s breathing shifted into the deep, steady roll of the sea.

* 

This was a bad idea. No this was a _terrible_ idea. But far be it from anyone to tell Finrod he was being a reckless idiot when he got like this. When Finrod had _that look_ , looking like his whole life was blazing on his face, there was no reasoning with him.

Brandir pressed his fist into his aching side, pausing to steady his other palm on the cool bark of a tree. Finrod charged forward, forging a tail through the forest ahead. He moved fast, practically jogging in his excitement, and Brandir’s aching side pinched in complaint just looking at him. There was no path to speak of, and nothing leading them but Finrod’s sense of adventure. 

“Slow down, for Eru’s sake!” Brandir shouted. 

Finrod flashed a look back over his shoulder. “The land has started to decline. It should be easier for a time.” Finrod’s voice was tipsy with an annoying blend of enthusiasm and sympathy. Brandir was not encouraged. 

“This is ridiculous,” Brandir grumbled, but he pushed himself off the tree and started walking again. “Who cares what’s in this old forest anyway? Probably a bunch of wolves and bears and poisons snakes!”

“You did not have to come,” Finrod answered, a bit snootily, Brandir thought. “I told you we could meet up again on the forest’s southern boundary.”

“What?” he threw back harshly, frustrated with Finrod’s easy dismissal. “And leave you to run off and get yourself killed in some foolhardy quest for Eru knows what?”

Finrod was conspicuously without reply.

“You see!” Brandir crowed. “You know I am right!”

“The matter of vindication is neither here nor there. We should set our minds upon the task’s completion, not lose our resolve to doubts of its authenticity,” Finrod delivered with utmost decorum, but Brandir had drawn close enough now to get a peek at his profile and saw the Elf was fighting a grin.

“That’s just your fancy way of not admitting I’m right!” Brandir shot back, good humor revived now Finrod had slowed his pace somewhat. 

“On the contrary—” Finrod’s voice broke off when a force of bow-wielding warriors dropped from the trees directly into their path.

Brandir’s hand jumped to his sword, pulling it free from its sheath in one smooth, practiced motion that sent the sound of a blade being ungloved ringing threateningly through the trees. Finrod’s hand had fallen on his sword’s hilt as well, but had not pulled steel.

Brandir ran an eye over the warriors. They were Elves, and from the manner of their dress he thought them akin to the Green Elves of Ossiriand. The mixing of sexes among the warriors further put Brandir in mind of the Green Elves, rather than the Sindar of Doriath whose males were the dominate warriors. They held their bows loosely in their hands, arrows fitted to the stings but not drawn. Brandir was a coiled wire, ready to spring and kill if these Elves proved hostel.

A tall male with a flat, pierced nose, and a high horse-tail of shell-white hair stepped forward. “Why, trespassers, should we not slay you here and now for daring to slink about our home like spies and thieves?”

“We are not spies or thieves,” Finrod answered, meeting the chilling gaze that promised death if his answer was not satisfactory. “We came into your forest thinking it emptied of inhabitants. We were mistaken, I apologize.” Finrod clasped his fist to his chest and offered a half-bow. “We mean you no harm. We greet you as friends.” 

The male sneered, “There are no ‘friends’ who come to Nan Elmoth.”

Finrod arched a brow, undeterred, “Well then we shall be the first.”

“This land is closed to you.”

Finrod shifted his eyes over the Elves, considering. Brandir didn’t see what needed considering; the Elves were telling them to get out, so they should turn around and go back the way they’d come as quickly as possible. “Your forest is very beautiful,” Finrod commented, taking his eyes off the threat to look dreamily about them at the botany. A noise like something was dying in his throat escaped Brandir as he sliced Finrod a disbelieving look. If Finrod was still hungry for adventure….

Finrod flashed his teeth at Brandir, which only served to alarm him more. Finrod eased his stance, dropped his hand from his sword hilt as if they were conducting a friendly chat in Nargothrond’s Halls. “Very beautiful. You are fortunate to call such a place home. Would you not give us your names? I would be honored to know you better.” 

“So you can trade our secrets with our enemies?” 

“I will swear on whatever you hold holy that I will never betray your secrets to the Black Foe.” 

The male dismissed the words with a slash of his hand though the air. “Morgoth is not the only one who wishes harm to the Wolf Clan. We perceive your purpose here, intruder. You come about Aredhel.” He took a step forward to place himself nearly at Finrod’s chest. Brandir shifted closer to Finrod, but was loathed to be the first to draw blood.

The male cast a dismissive look over Brandir before trying to cow Finrod with his eyes, “She is not here, and has not been for years. She flew back to her kin in their Hidden Kingdom, and we have heard nothing of her since.”

Finrod looked away from the challenging gaze to make a lazy appraisal of the Elf invading his personal space. His nose only reached Finrod’s chin, but he carried the broad shoulders of a Sinda. Drops of pearls and glass beads rimmed his ears, and his bones curved into rounded cheekbones in an oval face.

Finally Finrod said, “I did not come to demand answers about my cousin, Aredhel.” Finrod’s claim of kinship acted like the drawing of a blade. The moment balanced dangerously between the two males as if the other warriors had ceased to exist, neither willing to look away first. 

Brandir’s muscles bunched, held so tight his arms began to tremble. His eyes darted like flashing fish over the equally tense Elves. He worried Finrod would be the first to lash out, getting the other out of his face by any means necessary. The lord of Nargothrond was not half as stoic and serene as he pretended.

The moment was saved by a female stepping up to the male’s shoulder. “Breglos,” she named him, settling a hand on his arm and snapping his eyes down to hers. There was a strange moment when Brandir thought the male, Breglos, would do her some violence. But then his jaw unclenched, and her head dipped, her earthy-brown braid swinging forward across her face.

Breglos said, “Speak if you wish, Írimial.” 

Írimial stepped out of Breglos’ shadow. Her body appeared as small and delicate as a girl’s, though Brandir was convinced she was full-come to her maturity. She turned eyes dark and large as a doe’s on Finrod, “What do you know of Maeglin, our lord Eöl’s son? Do you know if he was forced to remain in Gondolin?”

Finrod’s voice dropped into a low, musical note, but there was always a touch of music in Finrod’s voice, more so than any other Elf Brandir had met. It was like Finrod was a breath from breaking into song at any moment, or as if his voice reflected some deeper music singing through his veins, twining about the very essence of who he was. “I know he lives yet in Gondolin, and that by the laws of that land he cannot leave. However, what his thoughts are on his life there I do not know.” 

Breglos said, voice like forged steel, “You will tell us all you know. Of Maeglin and how Eöl came to be dead.”

Finrod did not reply immediately, and Brandir cast another glace at his lord, wondering at the hesitation. _Just tell them_ , he thought. 

Breglos demanded, “You will tell us. And do not think us fools easily deceived because we do not live in stone cities. I _know_ Eöl passed into Gondolin, of this you cannot deceive me. No enemy could find this city, so tell me: how did Eöl Starborn, Lord of Nan Elmoth, come to meet death in a guarded city?”

“I will tell you,” Finrod conceded. 

“Now,” Breglos ordered, and motioned Finrod and Brandir to sit on a fallen log. But first he demanded they hand over their swords. Brandir would not have given his weapon up, would have fought them even if it cost his life before he relinquished his sword, but Finrod spoke to him softly, asking him to trust, and unbuckled his own weapon first, handing it over with a calm face.

Brandir followed Finrod down on the log, and the Elves sat in a half-circle in front of them. The demand for answers was made. Tell us _now_ how our lord died and what befell Maeglin. Brandir sat in growing horror as the story unfolded and came to its dreadful conclusion with these Elves’ lord executed by the Noldor of Gondolin. 

There was silence after Finrod finished, time stretching out, spilling into a cavity of potential violence. A murmuring of angry voices started in the back and rose. Brandir’s eyes darted to the trees. He was going to die. He was going to die. He was going—

Finrod’s hand fell strong and sure on his shoulder. It was warm, warmer than skin, warm with magic. A gentle pulse of confidence and stillness laid itself over Brandir’s frantically beating heart. It also served the purpose of reminding him who it was he sat beside. This was no Elven foot soldier. It was Finrod Felagund. 

For all Brandir had groused about Finrod running off recklessly into adventures, it was not as simple as that. Finrod had told him once, when Brandir criticized his rashness, saying he was more irresponsible with his own life than a Mortal youth high on thoughts of glory, that he did not think of his actions in such terms. Finrod said it was not recklessness, but a solid understanding of his own power. He was confident in his abilities. 

Brandir was reminded of that conversation with Finrod’s hand imparting a spell of calming into his bones. It was a simple spell, almost nothing for one such as Finrod. Finrod’s unfaltering composure came from the assurance that he could throw all these Elves to the ground with a Song of Power, or slip from their grasp like the wind. Brandir had seen only a small measure of Finrod’s Power, but to him it seemed Finrod had an unquenchable well in his breast. He thought if Finrod wanted to ride the wind, nothing could have stopped him.

It was, shockingly, Breglos who put a stop to the rising cries for retribution. Brandir would have thought Breglos would be the first in line to tear the Noldo in their midst apart. But with a simple gesture of his hand silence fell, as if he’d reached into their throats and torn up their vocal chords with his fist. 

Breglos turned hard eyes on Finrod. “What of Maeglin? You must know more of him than what you have said.”

Finrod stared back, eyes not dropping. “I know little, for communication in and out of Gondolin is nearly non-existent. I know Maeglin lives, but what his thoughts are on Eöl’s death or his mother’s, I do not know.”

“What will we do with this Golodh?” a female, with skin a deeper shade of black than the Men of Brethil, asked. There was no mistaking the fell look in her eyes. She wanted them to bear the weight of Eöl’s death since his killers were beyond their reach. Brandir’s hands fisted at his sides. The Elves fell into a debate in a language Brandir did not recognize, and only Finrod’s steady hand on his arm kept him seated. 

The Elves seemed unable to reach an accord of what was to be done. Then Breglos stirring from his silence and ended the argument the moment he opened his mouth. He spoke in a solemn voice, face drawn tight, but did not flicker vengeful glares at Finrod, instead turning a heavy gaze on his own people. 

Breglos turned back to Finrod and Brandir. He stood, ice-white hair rippling down his shoulder. There was no welcome in his cold eyes, but there was no violence either. 

His shoulders set straight, and as he spoke, he seemed to Brandir to transform from a snappish woodland Elf into the image of a king. “Your people have committed crime after crime against mine, oppressing them, stealing from them, humiliating and subjugating them, and partaking in the most despicable acts a human being can commit against another. There has been nothing your people would not do to mine. And now your people have murdered a man of pure heart. And I know that your people hold another good man prisoner, for Maeglin would never have chosen of his freewill to remain with his father’s killers in a land far from home. The crimes of your people against mine are beyond count. But a good man, a man your people hold as prisoner, once reminded me that allowing ourselves to be consumed by the pain and rage of what your people have done to us accomplishes nothing but our own destruction. And so I say to you, kin of our oppressors and murderers: leave. Go from this forest that has seen enough grief from the hands of your people, and never return.”

The hunger for adventure doused in Finrod’s eyes as Breglos spoke. His face was gave, eyes grieved. He stood and said, “We will leave as you have asked. And though I know it is worth little in the light of the crimes the Noldor have indeed committed against your people, still I would offer my deepest regrets for what has been done. I would promise that your people will never be mistreated again if I could, but have not the power to control the actions and words of every Noldo. I can only say that I will act with decency and justice to the best of my ability.” He inclined his head at the grim-faced Elves and fell silent.

Breglos did not answer his words, only motioned for their swords to be returned to them. Then he and his people faded into the tree shadows. Brandir did not for a moment believe Finrod and him were alone now though. They would be watched until they shook the last of this forest off. 

Finrod turned without a word and started traipsing back the way they’d come, his step weighty now where before it had sprung light as a foal’s. They did not break out of the forest before the sunset, and had to spend another night under these trees with eyes on them. They passed a quite meal. Brandir said his evening prayers, then lay down on his bedroll, his skin crawling with the sensation of being watched. He could find no rest until Finrod’s voice rose in Song and wove a sleeping spell over him, and he slipped into dreams.


	58. Chapter 46

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 46 

Finrod prepared a light breakfast for them as Brandir knelt, legs folded under him, hands lying open-palmed on his thighs. Brandir faced east towards the rising sun, though the thick forest blocked out even a hint of the sky. He kept his head bowed, the proper position for morning prayers. 

“I saw that Man kneeling like that last night. What is he doing?” Finrod’s head jerked up at the voice. He scanned the tree shadows, but could not unpick them to reveal the speaker. “Up here.” 

He looked up and found her seated on the lowest branch of an elm tree, one leg kicked out into space, the other folded against her chest. Her hair was white as cherry blossoms and tied up in the high-tail the Elves of this forest favored. Jade hung from her ears, and gold pierced her low-boned nose. He recognized her from yesterday’s run-in with the Elves who named themselves the Wolf Clan.

She noticed his inspection and stared back, eyes running over every inch of him from his pale-gold hair, to his worn travel boots. Her face did not shift from its arched, expectant look, awaiting an answer. 

Finrod left his breakfast preparations to not disturb Brandir, and walked up almost to the base of her tree. “He is praying,” he gestured to Brandir’s subservient position.

She cocked her head like a bird. “Praying to whom?”

“He prays to Eru Ilúvatar.” 

She dropped the knee folded up against her chest, both her legs now swinging out in empty space, back and forth like a child’s. “Why does he pray?”

Finrod glanced back at Brandir, “It is his way of expressing love for Eru Ilúvatar. In Valinor, my people were taught the Valar molded the world, but in truth they were only the tools. There was no flower Yavanna imagined that Eru had not first dreamt. No hidden ore Aulë folded into the mountains that Eru had not first woven into the Great Music. No creature of the deep oceans, not even the most insignificant bottom crawler, which Eru had not first written into the Great Song’s melody—”

She waved a hand, cutting him off, “The Golodhrim say this and that and you think you know all because you came out of the West with the Valar’s knowledge inflating your egos and poisoning your hearts. What do the Valar know? The Quendi knew Creator long before any Vala came to sow lies amongst us. We knew she watched from behind the stars, and was the womb from which all Quendi sprang.”

“I have never heard that –about Eru being a woman,” Finrod said. She spoke with passion and confidence, not the least apologetic. Only one of them could be right, and she obviously thought it was herself.

Longing swelled in his chest, pressing against his throat and the roof of his mouth. It had been too long since he sharpened his wits against another’s mind. Too long since he battled in debate, face flushed with the life of words and the spinning of thoughts, heart beating like a drum in his chest as he delved into the deep mysterious of their world. 

There never seemed to be the time for the simple joys of a discourse that sucked him down its warm throat until time had no meaning or measure, so captivated was he within the thoughts of another, the turning of a phrase, the snapping wit of a clever tongue, the way the light of evening played on the other’s face, and then the shadows of night, and then the pale touch of dawn.

Such sweet hours, slipping by unnoted, were not for hard lands such as these. If there was one thing he missed about their life in Valinor, it was the time. Time seemed always in abundance there. Days, years of which could be spent pursuing some remote concept, hashing out the finer points of a Law of Nature, counting how many waves hit the shore in an hour just because the question took his fancy one day. 

He could not imagine spending an afternoon upon such pursuits now. It would be deemed a waste. He had too much to do, too many duties calling his name and ‘real life’ problems to sort out.

“Is it not women within whose bodies babes grow? So too must the world have grown within Creator’s womb.” 

He would have to write an essay on this theory of Eru’s female gender…or he would if he had the time for purely intellectual pursuits. “How does your people’s worship of the Land fit into this belief? I was given to understand by other Wood-elves I have spoken to, that they believe the first Elves were born from the Land. I have heard others say that all new children born are but the _fëar_ of dead Elves, reborn again and again in a continuous cycle of rebirth.”

Her eyes narrowed, face closing with wariness. “Why do you ask of my people’s beliefs?”

Finrod pulled on a smile he knew was charming. “I have often been accused of possessing too much curiosity for my own good. Call it an intellectual curiosity, for that is all it is.”

The wariness did not ease from her face. “If you have spoken to others of the Land and my people’s beliefs, then you must have an opinion on them. So tell me, what do you think, Golodh?”

Finrod lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “As I said, it is an intellectual curiosity, nothing more.” 

“But you are a Golodh,” she flashed a sharp, white smile, like a wolf’s barring of fangs. “Golodhrim _always_ have an opinion.”

“I cannot lay claim to a purity of mind free of any bias, but casting judgment or scorn are not my overriding motivations. Curiosity is.” He gestured back at Brandir, “I do not share Brandir’s beliefs, but I respect his right to them. And the same to your people. If there is any worship I find I cannot respect, it is Valar worship.”

Her brow creased. “Before, you spoke as one who worships the Creator.”

“I do not _worship_ Eru. I do not worship any god, nor do I worship the Land. Do I believe Eru created all things from an ant, to the Elves, to the Ainur who have set themselves up to be gods? Yes. But do I bow down to Eru, worship him, sacrifice to him, and think of my life only in terms of its pleasingness to him? No.” 

“How can you worship nothing?” 

He did not expect her to understand. She had never lived in Valinor where laws had yoked them, choking the life and joy out of existence. She had never been _forced_ to bow down to beings setting themselves up as gods. To reject the Valar in Valinor had been a revolutionary concept, but the Valar worship had been too ingrained in Noldorin hearts and their perception of the world for them to see that they did not have to put another god in the Valar’s place. They could not see they were free to worship no gods at all. 

“By simply focusing on enjoying my existence,” Finrod answered with a smile.

She made a sound in the back of her throat, but gave no reply. She studied his upturned face for a long moment, legs swinging back and forth, fingers tapping out a rhythm on the branch’s bark as if she could not bear to hold still, or as if too much energy zinged inside her body to do so. 

The stare broke when a starling winging onto her shoulder, greeting her with its high, chirping song. She scratched the bird on the back of its head, ruffling the purple-black feathers. She sang back in the same high-throated language of the starlings.’ Finrod watched her converse with the bird in its own language, a skill he’d not found in an Elf outside of Celegorm, though he’d heard tales of Wood-elves and Sindar who’d acquired it without the aid of a Vala. 

She tucked her legs under her and climbed up higher into the tree without a backwards glance at him. “Will you leave before I even know your name?”

She paused, and turned a look back at him over her shoulder. “What is your name then, Golodh?”

“Finrod.”

She held her own name behind her teeth for another long moment of studying him. Finally she said, “Súlmae,” but did not linger for more.

He followed her lithe form until it disappeared into the shadows. He would have liked her to linger awhile yet and continue their discussion. Pursuing his curiosities for no sake but the seeking of knowledge had become a rare delicacy on his tongue. 

Debating with Súlmae on the nature of the Creator reminded him of conversations he’d had with another woman long ago. He did not dwell on Amarië’s memory often. It was fruitless. He did not expect to see her again. 

He shut his eyes, looking into the darkness behind his closed lids, and traced the lines of her mouth as it whispered to him from the past. She was saying something –her face pretty as a flower, eyes teasing him that she’d won this round—but he could not hear, the words were drifting away on the current of distance until all that remained was the memory of her lips curved into a smile, telling him a secret. 

Angrod asked him once if he forgave Amarië for remaining behind in Tirion, abandoning him as Angrod put it. There was nothing to forgive. She had chosen her family over him, just as he had chosen his over her. But while he did not blame her, he no longer dreamed of the life they’d once planned to build together.

He saw again two dead Trees, their petals once pooled with brightness; he saw an ocean swept into peeked claws as it devoured white ships; he saw a land of ice stretching out before him like a bed of suffering. She was of Aman now, and he of Endor. Too much lay between for them to ever stroll hand in hand in a garden debating the physiology of the Valar, the freewill of the Quendi, or the nature of love as they had once done. He’d taken his love for her and folded it into a quilt of memories, untouched by grief and untainted by resentment, and tucked them into a place in his heart he kept just for her. 

*

Finrod mapped the patterns of consolations in the night sky. They’d left the forest behind by mid-morning, spilling from its twilight shadows into the blaze of the summer sun and the wide, rolling plains of Estolad. They would meander their way south along Doriath’s border back to Nargothrond. 

The adventure was almost over, and the freedom with it. Soon he would be King Finrod again, tied to his throne and duties. But he had chosen kinship in his ignorance, and a sense of responsibility towards those Noldor who’d followed him and his House more than Fingolfin out of Valinor.

As much as he loved Nargothrond, he was also chained to her. And yet if it was not her, it would be the war like his uncle Fingolfin and brothers and cousins in the North. The life overflowing with time they’d left in Valinor did not exist in these harsher lands. And though he mourned the lost luxury, he named his people’s freedom from the Valar’s laws and rule worth the cost. 

He had freedom now. So why was there discontent in his heart? Why did the thought of retuning to Nargothrond feel like walking back into the heavy weight of a crown and all this emptiness in his chest? 

Why wasn’t he happy when he had so _much_?

Brandir mumbled in his sleep and rolled over onto his side, back to Finrod where he sat watch under the stars. Their campfire had banked down to low, glowing embers. Finrod sighed. It was only the loneliness of the night. Once he was back in Nargothrond he’d be surrounded by his people again, and too busy to dwell on the empty chambers of his heart much less the mysteries of the universe. And it wasn’t as if he did not have companionship waiting for him when he returned, but… 

Was this loneliness the absence of his siblings? Perhaps he should make the trip to Dorthonion and Angrod and Aegnor more often, or ask Galadriel to visit his halls for a time.

(He missed his father. He missed him terribly. But he did not allow himself to dwell on this ache. His father was sundered from him. They would never see each other again. He did not think of his cousin who had turned into a stranger after Elenwë’s death. He had not spoken to Turgon except for perfectly polite but empty words since that day on the ice.)

Tonight he made a poor night’s watch, for the Elf had nearly walked right into their camp before he noticed her. His hand dropped to his sword hilt when he caught movement in his peripheral, but did not drawn steel before he recognized her. It was the woman from the Wolf Clan, Súlmae. 

She seemed to glide through the long grass, its stalks brushing against her bare calves, her naked feet dropping lightly as a doe’s. Her blossom-white hair haloed her, loosened from its high, warrior’s tail. She wore only a short buckskin tunic that hemmed her upper thighs, leaving the long, brown length of her legs bare.

She walked to him through the moonlight, and stopped only an arm’s distance from him. She said nothing as she tossed down her weapons and traveling sack, but her eyes did not leave his face. He did not ask why she had followed them out of the forest, or what her intentions were, the word for what she wanted lay scrolled inside her eyes, in the half-dressed manner of her approach.

She pulled her tunic up by its hem and over her shoulders. She let it fall through her fingertips to drop into the grass as her hair settled against her naked skin. His eyes ran over her body, pausing to linger on the parts fairest to his eye.

He had already been roused by her nakedness before she closed the last distance between them and straddled his waist. He slid his hands up her smooth thighs, and looked into her face. Her hair swung a curtain between it and the light, but her eyes caught all the moonlight and spilled it back with interest. 

She lifted her hands and combed them through his hair, eyes mapping his face. “I would wander into your bed.”

Desire leapt within him, and heady freedom. He could have her, out here in the wilderness, partaking in whatever pleasures they liked however they liked, and he would not have to worry over covering his tracks as he did in Nargothrond to avoid the scandal. He could lie with her without fear of consequences. They would be nothing more than two bodies seeking pleasure in the night.

He slid his hand up the valley of her spine to cup the back of her neck and lowered her mouth down to his for a kiss. He guided her legs to lock around his waist and lifted her, walking to his bedroll and laying her down. She rolled them so she straddled him, and began tugging the clothing from his body.

No more words passed between them, only the sound of their lust’s fulfillment. She rode him and wrung release from their bodies. After they lay panting under the moonlight for a time, she sought pleasure from him again and he rolled her eagerly beneath him. 

He awoke with his arm wrapped loosely around her waist, her body molded into the shape of his. A chipmunk observed him with dark, suspicious eyes from its perch on the point of Súlmae’s shoulder. It chattered at him, then dove under Súlmae’s hair, burrowing down into it like a nest.

He became used to the occurrence of waking to a woodland creature nosing around their bedroll in the weeks Súlmae shared his bed before wandering back out, heading for home again. The worst had been the raccoon. It had shown up more than once, enamored with Súlmae, acting like a jealous lover. It kept stealing Finrod’s clothes and hiding them. Once, Finrod had to search three hours for his leggings. Brandir thought it was hilarious, and Súlmae had been no help at all where she’d sat feeding corn kernels to the little monster.

Súlmae did not travel with them. She wandered the wilds around them, meandering back to them in the night to share Finrod’s bed. During the day she would pull him away when they passed a secret wonder she wanted to show him: a waterfall, lush meadow, breath-catching view. 

She knew these plains and woodlands as well as her forest home. She told him she’d once explored them freely and often before the sons of Fëanorion stole them. (Finrod did not want to think of what the Sindar and Wood-elves living in his own realm thought of his people’s migration into Nargothrond’s lands. Did they look upon it as land-thief, or occupation?)

The last day she spent with them a fox made its home at her heels, following her around on her wanderings, nosing through the wild’s wonders along with her as they chatted in the language of foxes. As the sun began its slide into the west, Súlmae returned and beckoned Finrod to follow her. He did as he always did, and was not disappointment. She led him to a little pool shaded by willows, its banks dotted with wildflowers.

They fucked in the soft grass. Then bathed their sweaty bodies in the pool, and found softer pleasure together with the water still dripping from their skin. As they lay in the grass after, Súlmae retrieved a little box she’d made ready, and told him she wanted to ink him.

He rolled up on one elbow, and traced the shimmering runes running the length of her spine. She had only told him a few days ago what they read, holding the secret tight behind her lips until then: Súlmae Starchild, daughter of Henwë Starchild. 

“No,” she said, “it will not be permanent inking. But I know how you enjoy sampling new experiences. You have never been inked, have you?”

He shook his head. “I would be honored if you would give me my first.”

She took his hand and traced his palm, finger running light and ticklish as a spider over the skin. He kissed her shoulder, down her collarbone, hands playing over the road of her spine. When she settled on a design she liked, she sat forward, reaching for the ink pot and delicately tipped brush. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, and he admired its luster. It was even whiter than the moon, and felt like cream under his fingertips. She snatched up his hand, brandishing the brush like other women did needles. 

The brush did not tickle like her fingers had. He held still while she painted his hand. It was very beautiful, he decided. He’d seen some of the Ossiriand Elves do something similar. He compared it to a Noldo woman’s delicate needlework, only instead of decorating fabric, this adorned the skin. 

He watched Súlmae as she worked. The tip of her tongue was caught between her teeth as she concentrated. He thought he might love her. It wasn’t the love like sunlight he’d shared with Amarië. This had been birthed in lust, but the love that grew out of that birthing bed ran just as deep as the one he bore for Amarië. 

“Finished,” she held up her completed masterpiece for inspection, blowing lightly on the skin to help the drying ink along. 

“It is beautiful work,” he complemented in wonder. He turned his hand over, trying to take in all the details. He especially liked the star design she’d done on the center of his palm. 

He touched her hair with his unlinked hand, and watched it slide like milk between his fingers. Once the ink had dried, he wanted to have her again. She packed her supplies away, and lay down on her back in the grass. They did not speak, just enjoying the peace of the moment, the sound of the pool’s lapping water, the bird song and wind playing through the willow branches. 

Súlmae’s fox padded over and nuzzled her palms. She obliged, and scratched it behind the ears. She broke the silence with, “I will head home tomorrow.”

Finrod’s fingers paused in her hair. He had always known that was how this would end; he said regardless, “You could come back with me, to Nargothrond…”

She slanted him a look. “You already know I do not belong there, and have no wish to live amongst your people. My home is Nan Elmoth, and my people the Wolf Clan.”

“I know.”

She turned onto her side to face him, brow creasing, “Do you desire to take me for mate? I had not thought so.”

Did he? It didn’t matter for she would no more want that life than he would want to tie her to it. He wished he could stay out here with her wandering the wilds, all responsibilities snipped off his shoulders, freeing them. 

But such a desire was too selfish to be indulged. His people depended upon him, and he could hardly spend his time frolicking through woodlands when his uncle, brothers, and cousins spent theirs in the protection of the world. Nargothrond had its role to play as the North’s breadbasket, and he as her king must ensure politics, ambitions, and greed did not usurp Nargothrond’s duty to the North.

Súlmae’s lips brushed his brow, “I will not forget you, Finrod.”

“Nor I you,” he kissed into the curve of her chin. He traced her face with his hands, memorizing it. He doubted they would meet again. He would tuck up this yearning for her and the taste of freedom on her tongue that had had so little time to blossom, and give it its own chamber in his heart. 

In the morning she faded away into the dawn, her fox looping circles around her feet.


	59. Chapter 47

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 47

Year 437 of the First Age, Nargothrond

Nargothrond had been hallowed out by the Narog River in Arda’s infancy. Its limestone walls were smooth as the pebbles of a streambed, where they weren’t decorated with chiseled friezes and recesses housing statues and flowering trees Finrod’s own hand had carved. The Khazâd had set the floor with granite so precisely polished that when the lanterns were lit, one thought they walked upon a river of light. Stalagmite hung from the ceiling like sharp, glittering teeth, affording the Great Hall a perilous atmosphere Finrod secretly reveled in. 

But Nargothrond was a great deal more than a pretty-network of caves. It was a realm, the largest in territory in Beleriand, with Thingol’s Doriath and Turgon’s Gondolin the only kingdoms boasting a higher population. Ruling such a large populace of diverse cultures, dispersed over a great swath of land with many varying climates, was no simple task.

Finrod did not consider himself a born ruler. He found it tedious work, ruling. Duty was such a great weight to slip about your neck. He had not understood this in Tirion when Fëanor’s words stirred visions of wild lands and mighty kingdoms in his heart. He’d learned what it meant to rule, and he would give the ‘privilege’ back now if he could. But he led the House of Finarfin, and much was expected of him. 

He leaned back on his throne, be-jeweled hands dangling over the armrests. The Nauglamír lay cool and light upon his neck. He scanned the line of waiting petitioners with their complaints already perched on their tongues, and their appeals arranged precisely on rolls of parchment clutched to their chests and containing the signature of such and such an amount of supporters, or even their province lord, if they were fortunate.

He beckoned the next in line to step forward. He estimated he had another hour to spare these petitioners before other business pushed them out. He ensured his people had a measure of his mornings to bring their concerns directly to his ears, rather than trusting in roundabout channels. Of course he could not judge every little matter, that was what his lords were for. He would never accomplish anything if he had to listen to arguments over who owned a disputed pig, a silversmith claiming he didn’t get paid his due on a commission, or fisher families feuding over rights to the best spots on the River Ringwil.

The woman next in line was announced: “Elemmírë, of the Husbandman’s coalition, hailing from Lord Rochiel’s province on the Taleth Dirnen, come to speak on water rights of the River Narog, lord king.”

Elemmírë stepped forward with confidence. Her dress was clean and free of the signs of long wear, but no court silks. Her hands bore the calluses of hard work, and were folded neatly before her as she stood before her king, untrembling, her eyes meeting his. Her dark hair and eyes were but the finishing touches he could see in ever proud line of her body: here was a Noldo. 

And yet here too was the mark of the Sindar’s influence upon Nargothrond’s collective culture. Elemmírë’s hair lay in loose waves down her back, forgoing the complex Noldorin braids, and from her hip swung a chain of wooden beads, each carefully carved to denote its fiscal worth. 

The old coins the Noldor had once used as their sole form of currency had been abandoned by the lower classes, replaced by trade beads and Letters of Promise, which made acquiring goods between them easier when the gold and silver coins of the elite were so sparse. The wealthy, both merchants and nobles alike, had put up quite the fuss when the lower classes devised their own means of compensating for the wealth of treasures the Noldor had left behind in Valinor, one that did not benefit the rich. But it was a sensible solution for a nation that, despite their pride, had fallen far from the affluence they knew in Valinor. 

Finrod opened his palm to the woman, signally his permission to speak. 

“My king, I thank you for receiving me,” she inclined her head. “I come before you on behalf of the farmers of Taleth Dirnen. We live modest lives, but have been content under your rule many years, and no grievance would any hear pass our lips. But this score of years has been dry. Little rain has The One blessed us with, the rivers run low, and we go hungry. The crops need water, and we need the River Narog to feed them. Yet we see the fields of Lord Agarod’s people to the north of us –who take first from the waters—flourish. What then are we to think but that they have taken more than their fair share of the river water? Many years ago when we first followed our King Finrod to these lands, an agreement was made for the fair consumption of the River Narog. But now we see Lord Agarod’s people have broken faith. We ask that you intercede for us on our behalf. We have ever been your faithful servants, my lord king, do not abandon us in our time of need!”

Finrod shifted forward as she spoke, mouth pulling down. “What of your lord, Lord Rochiel? Have you brought this concern to him?” he asked, though he thought he already knew the answer.

“Yes my king, many times. And yet, it is as I have spoken. Still.” She did not hesitate to tell him, though it cast her lord in an unfavorable light.

“I see. I shall speak with Lords Agarod and Rochiel.” He kept his anger checked, and gave her a smile as she was led away. The news that Lord Rochiel had done nothing was not surprising. Agarod had Rochiel in his pocket, holding an indiscretion over his head. It was politics, and people were suffering because of it.

The next to step forward was one known to Finrod. Finrod stood quickly and descended the shallow steps of his dais to embrace Gwindor. This was what he found so pleasing about Gwindor, and why the man had earned his unshakable respect. Any other lord (nay not even lord, for Gwindor called High King Fingolfin great-grandfather and could be named a prince) would have cut in front of these common people without thought, though some had come faithfully for days to stand before the king. Not so Gwindor. Guilin and Bainar had raised their sons well.

After Finrod released Gwindor, Gelmir was there to take his place, embracing his brother fiercely. Gelmir slapped Gwindor on the back, sending up a puff of dust off Gwindor’s cloak. “When did you get here, you great idiot?” Gelmir grinned, a rare expression on his usually solemn face. 

The brothers were close as twins, and yet different as Elf and Khazed. Gelmir, with his reserved, modest smile hiding an agile mind behind unassuming manners, and Gwindor, who was everything a warrior was meant to aspire to be: humble, brave as the sun, with a laugh like a lion’s roar, and the strong body of a soldier. 

Gelmir, emboldened temporarily by the high of his brother’s unlooked for presence, demanded: “Why did you not come see me at once? Doesn’t your brother warrant even a hello?”

Gwindor laughed, head thrown back, hair slithering down his back. The Great Hall’s blue and silver-glass lamps caught in the river of hair and turned it into a flash of sunlight deep beneath the earth. If Gwindor were Mortal, Finrod thought, he would be one of those old men who collected laugh lines like mementos, a beautiful collection edging his eyes in tribute to a life lived large. 

“Hello, Brother,” Gwindor said cheekily, earning a punch on the shoulder from Gelmir.

Brothers though they were, Gelmir and Gwindor were not akin in looks anymore than they were in personality. Gwindor had inherited the blue eyes passing from father-to-son down from Fingolfin, and that fair hair so common among Finarfin’s line, though his was an aged gold. But Gelmir had all the darkness of a Noldo, with eyes and hair of obsidian. 

Finrod was conscious of the many Elves still waiting patiently to see him, and loath though he was to put an end to their merriment, Gwindor had come on business. Gelmir could hear all the news from their father’s land and rib Gwindor to his heart’s content later. He would make a note to release Gelmir from his duties for the length of Gwindor’s stay. The two brothers were not as often together as they would like these days, their duties pulling them in different directions. Gwindor was the eldest, and as such Guilin’s heir. He spent much of his time in his father’s lands to the east. Gelmir though, had chosen another path.

Finrod would never have asked for it, but once offered would not throw a gift so freely given and deserving of the utmost respect back into the giver’s face. Gelmir had wanted to swear himself to Finrod as one of his sworn-companions, and Finrod had not been able to refuse. There were a handful of other Elves who had insisted on doing the same, though Finrod never sought them out, only accepting the service when offered. It made him uncomfortable –that kind of selfless life, with such a strong focus on duty above all else—but his discomfort was one of those things he never revealed.

“What business brings you to Nargothrond, Lord Gwindor?” Finrod asked formally, returning to his throne to hear the petition.

Gwindor straightened, clasping his hands behind his back and straightening his shoulders. “My lord king, I come before you by request of Prince Guilin, Lord of the Andram Province in the great realm of Nargothrond.”

“And what would Prince Guilin have of me?” 

“My king, a tribe of King Thingol’s Sindar have crossed into our lands. They come into our villages and towns and take whatever catches their fancy. They have made off with not only valuables, but food and livestock as well. Prince Guilin has met with their chieftain to express our concerns, but the chieftain either does not care or is the instigator of the theft, for he has done nothing to curb his people and refuses to leave our lands as my father requested. He says these are the lands of the Sindar and the Noldor have no right to them. Prince Guilin requests your intervention in this matter, as he deems it a problem that may require negotiations with King Thingol.”

Negotiations with Thingol were the last thing he needed, but before he could give a swift ruling, one of the attending nobles motioned to speak. Finrod granted him leave reluctantly. Pinned proudly to the lord’s breast was a double-headed eagle brooch; its wings were splayed in symmetrical defiance. The brooch was a mark of the Sons of Eru sect, and highlighted everything Finrod disliked about this lord.

“My king,” the lord stepped confidently forward, not acknowledging Gwindor. Gwindor wore the modest emblem of the Keepers of Light upon his cloak. “I do not believe we should lightly overlook this Sindar tribe as simple trespassers. It is my belief that these Sindar are in fact King’s Eyes, sent to spy upon the Noldor by that most arrogant and devious of Sindar: King Thingol of Doriath. It would not, after all, be the first time we uncovered King’s Eyes in our lands.” 

Finrod dismissed the accusation with a chop of his hand, “The matter of the King’s Eyes was finished between Thingol and myself years ago. The likelihood he would attempt such a ruse again is miniscule.”

“But still a possibility,” the noble pushed doggedly.

“I said the matter was closed. It is closed.” Finrod’s voice fell as final as a bell’s toll.

He no longer shared the comfortable alliance with Thingol they once had, but he was not going to entertain wild paranoia of imagined treachery on his Eastern borders. With a promise to Gwindor that he’d look into the matter, he dismissed both Gwindor and Gelmir from their duties. They would probably both end up drunk with Gwindor regaling the Warden’s Hall with a sample of his fine singing voice.

The next in line was a man dressed in a surprisingly fashionable tunic of midnight-blue stitched with a gold diamond pattern. The herald bent to hear the man’s words before announcing him, and Finrod watched a crease press between the herald’s brow, but he dutifully spoke: “Ohtarmon of the Guild of Tailors of Nargothrond City, come to beseech a boon.”

Finrod didn’t have to hear a word out from the tailor’s mouth to know he was someone’s puppet.

“Most gracious king! Lord of Nargothrond of the Beautiful Caves, I cast myself upon your renowned generosity!”

Finrod arched a brow, “What is your request?”

“My king, long have I served The One true God. I am his faithful and humble servant, and yet I, and my fellow believers, have been denied a place to lift up our worship to The One! I ask, nay, _beg_ that a place might be built in our beautiful city so that followers of The One might gather in fellowship and worship!”

Finrod’s hands tightened on the throne’s armrests. It was all an act. He knew who sent this man. And while it was true they wanted their ‘place of worship,’ they were only forcing the issue to try and make him appear intolerant and sacrilegious. He would never sanction the building of a temple, or waste money upon a shrine that might as well have craved statues of the Valar upon its doors. 

The tailor was a puppet of the Order of the Faith sect. The Order of the Faith were the most conservative of The One’s worshipers, clinging fiercest to ceremonies, Rites, and scheduled prayers. The Order of the Faith and Sons of Eru were constantly feuding. If the Order of the Faith were known for their piety, then the Sons of Eru were known for their antagonistic speeches. The Sons of Eru were not afraid to stir up their followers into violent ends to press their aims. 

The Sons of Eru didn’t take the proposition of a temple lying down, but it was more than the attending nobles who broke out in shouts, fists shaking at the man who dared suggest Eru belonged in a stone house. Some of the gathered commoners, members of one sect or other, were also yelling in protest. 

The majority of Nargothrond’s population numbered themselves among the Keepers of Light sect though, and these were the ones who recited their prayers like dutiful followers of The One, but also walked the tight-rope between the militant Sons of Eru who would see any who took up idols of the Valar, or even whispered a word in their favor, cast out of the realm by force if necessary, and the Order of the Faith who dithered their own line between worshiping The One and sending their prayers up to the Valar.

Finrod wanted to press the heels of his palms into his eyes and scream at them to all shut up already, but he couldn’t indulge in such a display. To the Order of the Faith he, as the king and holder of authority, was also an obstacle in their way, forever blocking their goals (perhaps some even considered him an enemy). And to the Sons of Eru he was no inspirational or admirable leader either. 

He was spared having to get this near-riot back into order when a loud commotion at the doors of the Great Hall cut though the shouting and fist waving, and turned all heads to the messenger hurrying down the long, echoing hall of stone.

The messenger was clad in the muted browns and greens the Wardens of the Guarded Plain, which camouflaged them as cleverly as any spells, and lent them the power to stalk strangers wandering too close to Nargothrond’s secret doors. “My king!” The messenger went to his knee, face eager and flushed like a youth. “The Wardens have been tracking a party of Wood-elves for five days who came down from the north. They are not a war party. Indeed, they have children among them. The Wardens thought to turn them back since they came ever closer to the gates, and though they wandered unsurely, they were actively searching for something which the Wardens believed must be a hint of Nargothrond’s doors. When the Wardens revealed themselves and tried to turn them away, their leader demanded they be brought before ‘Felagund of Nargothrond.’ He said my lord king would know him by name. He calls himself: Breglos.” 

Finrod’s eyes widened and he sat forward on his throne. “Yes, he is known to me. Where are these Elves now?”

“We did not know if he spoke true, my king, so the Wardens are keeping them in one of the watch towards of Amon Ethir.”

“Bring them here, and let them be treated with the utmost respect and hospitality. Give them food, and do not push the young ones too hard.” Finrod’s mind ran like quicksilver over a thousand possible reasons the Wolf Clan could have for abandoning their beloved forest. Almost none of them were good.

*

Strangely it was the smell he noted first. He’d come storming into the antechamber he’d had the party of Wolf Clan members ushered into –suspecting they would be uncomfortable under the towering ceiling and many scrutinizing eyes of the Great Hall. His mind was overflowing with a hundred little things he could do to make the Wolf Clan’s stay more amiable, and already making rash vows in his head to give them whatever aid they required, when the smell hit him. All his plans and vows unraveled like the unwanted offerings they would have been. 

He’d forgotten, somehow, in the years since his feet had pressed into the soft pine-needle forest floor of Nan Elmoth and felt Power throbbing like blood beneath his soles, what freedom smelt like. These Elves would not have come to him for aid, not even if their Clan lay upon the brink of extinction and he alone could save them. Whatever the reason for the Wolf Clan’s coming, it was not as desperate refugees.

Finrod’s gaze swept greedily over the party of Elves (smaller than he’d expected), but he could not find Súlmae’s cherry-blossom head among them. Breglos, his tall, strong form rising a good half-head above all the others, was an easy find. 

Finrod crossed to him. “Well met. Is your sister among you?” he asked without preamble. 

Breglos’ mouth pinched, and his body stiffened as if a hot rod of metal had been melded to his spine. “She is not.” His eyes flickered to the silent sworn-companions at Finrod’s back, eyes lingering over the fineness of their tunics, the jewels set like causal bobbles upon their hands and belts, and the easy confidence they displayed in their own home. “We have come on an errand to you, Felagund, but it is between us and us alone.”

Finrod glanced back at his companions. It would be a grave insult to send them away, yet it would be an insult to Breglos to keep them here knowing the Wolf Clan’s distrust of outsiders. 

Finrod said gently, but with the authority of their king, “Thangear, Edrahil, I would like a moment alone.”

Their faces tightened. Edrahil’s mouth parted as if in protest, but Thangear tugged on his elbow before he could speak back to their king. “As you wish, sire,” Thangear offered him a genuine bow (not the mocking ones he favored all other lords and ladies), and pulled the flushing Edrahil away. 

Finrod hated to do it, especially to Edrahil who was so young yet so fiercely loyal, but he trusted Thangear to calm the young man’s agitation until he could explain himself to his companions. 

It was not required he defend his orders, but he was not the kind of lord who either wanted or practiced blind loyalty. He _wanted_ Edrahil to mull commands over in his head and come to him later for an explanation; he wanted Thangear’s quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) cynicism towards court politics and life in general, just as he wanted Gelmir’s inquisitive mind questioning everything because he just had to _understand_. 

After his companions had left, Finrod turned back to Breglos. His eyes fell to the slight woman at his side, recognizing Írimial. He smiled at her and opened his mouth to greet her when the screech of metal falling on stone and the startled cry of a child sent the Elves spinning around to see the source of the clamor at their backs. Finrod’s hand jumped to his hip and the weapon that was not there. 

A young boy turned guilty eyes up at them, hand still wrapped around a long sword. The child’s curiosity had sent a decorative shield that had been displayed on the wall next to the very same sword he now held crashing to the floor. The boy shifted under their gaze, fingers clenching around the sword he’d had no business reaching for, and probably had to stand on tippy-toes to acquire.

“Gildor,” Írimial sighed, “could you not last two minutes without getting into mischief?”

“Sorry, Auntie,” the boy mumbled, hanging his head.

“Who is this?” Finrod forced the words out, though his throat felt swollen as if with fever, and his skin burned and itched. He couldn’t take his eyes off the child. 

The boy’s hair hung around his face in strands so near the color of Breglos and Súlmae’s he could have been none other but their kin. He had their low-bridged nose, and an echo of Súlmae’s brown skin. His face though was not the oval shape theirs favored, but curved into a sweet heart’s shape, and he had clear blue eyes. They looked…they looked like Finrod’s eyes.

“Gildor, come here,” Breglos called the child forward, and the boy immediately dropped the sword to follow Breglos’ call. 

The child stood small, head bowed, in the shadow of Breglos’ towering form. Breglos settled a hand on the boy’s fair head, caressing the unbound hair with a strange mixture of tenderness and possessiveness. Gildor held still and silent under the touch.

But after a moment, Gildor’s hands started twisting in his tunic, and his foot shook out a soft rhythm against the stone floor. There was no doubt in Finrod’s mind: this was Súlmae’s son. “The father?” his voice was a rasp. He knew, he already knew, he’d just never considered…

“You.”

The boy peeked at him from under his fringe, but there was nothing shy in the gaze. It was boldness. Finrod stared back, ensnared in those stunning eyes. 

Should he kneel down, embrace the child? Was that his right? What was expected of him, what did the chi— _his son_ expect? He’d never thought to be a father, not of one so young. He’d fostered the line of Bëor, but only after they’d reached fifteen years. He’d not had close dealings with a child this young since Orodreth was that age. 

He determined to draw upon that old experience now. He used to love children, he remembered like a forgotten dream, back in Valinor, in another world. He went on one knee before his son and claimed the right of kinship when he reached out and touched the child’s soft cheek. “Hello, little one.”

Gildor’s chin snapped up, “I am not _little_.” He favored Finrod with a glare that would have done Aegnor proud.

Finrod’s mouth twitched, “So it seems.” The child was what, six? So young.

Breglos stepped in. “Súlmae was killed.” Finrod sucked in a sharp breath. He’d begun to suspect something like this, but to hear the words… “It was her last wish that you be informed of Gildor’s existence and offered the chance to raise him. But,” he warned, voice hard and stony gaze entrapping Finrod’s, “if you cannot care for him as you ought, then speak now. Gildor is my nephew, and will always have a place amongst his mother’s people. I will raise him as my own son if you cannot give him what he needs, Felagund.”

Finrod unbent his knee, and stood to face Breglos. A part of him knew he should not do this, that he was being selfish. He was a king with many demands already upon him. How could he possibly give Gildor the love and attention of two parents? He couldn’t. That softly whispering part in the back of his mind was telling him he should let Breglos raise Gildor in freedom, never knowing the pressures of a child of Finwë’s line, never knowing the terrible curse of the Noldor, never knowing what it was to be a king’s bastard (for that is what he would be called). 

But Finrod could not do it. He wanted this too badly. He could not let Gildor go now he’d found him. So he ignored the voice. Gildor was his son, was he not? Who had more right to raise the child than him?

Because he’d convinced himself this was right, that this was _his_ right, he said: “Gildor has a home, here, with me.”

He looked down at the child. His child. For all the boldness in Gildor’s eyes, the mischief and curiosity, there was also that longing of those who had lost their mother too soon. It was a hunger about the edges of his eyes. 

Breglos studied Finrod a long moment, as if trying to read the lie on Finrod’s face. But Finrod was not lying; Gildor had a home here, and he would be loved and treasured just as he would have been in Nan Elmoth. There would be none of Nan Elmoth’s acceptance, its freedom for Gildor to grow into whatever person he chose to be, but Finrod would love him. This at least he knew.

Breglos’ jaw clenched, but he ground out: “Very well.” He had never lifted his hand from Gildor’s head, and now it slid down to rest about Gildor’s shoulders. “Do you wish to stay here, cub? You know you can come home with Auntie and I, if that is your wish.”

Gildor flicked an uncertain gaze between his uncle and father. “I want to go home,” he started unsurely, “but Mamma made me promise to see if I liked living with my father. I have to stay.”

Breglos sighed. He bent and kissed the top of Gildor’s head. “Remember, cub, you always have a home with us.” Then quieter, so soft Finrod almost didn’t catch the words, Breglos whispered into Gildor’s ear: “I have loved you as if you were my own.” Gildor threw his arms around his uncle’s neck and buried his face in its crook. 

Finrod looked away. But he did not take back his words. He coveted this treasure too fiercely.

Gildor was passed around into the arms of the gathered Wolf Clan, each one taking a moment to hold the boy one last time. Írimial clung for a long time, but she did not weep. “You must come visit, my little wolf,” Írimial’s voice shook as she held Gildor’s face in her hands. 

Her attention swept up to where Finrod watched uncomfortably, “You must promise to let Gildor come home to us if he wishes.”

“Of course,” Finrod swore softly.

“And for visits, he must come to visit,” Írimial insisted.

“When he is older.” She nodded, accepting the requisite reluctantly. 

Breglos stepped between them, blocking the painful vision of Írimial kissing Gildor’s nose from Finrod’s sight. “A word,” he snapped, quiet enough not to dawn Gildor’s attention.

Finrod let himself be led closer to the door and out of Gildor’s hearing. When Breglos swung to face him, his face was twisted in a battle of grief and resentment. But he had lost his sister, and now Finrod stole Gildor from him, who Breglos had loved as his own son.

Breglos spoke because he loved Gildor more than any resentment trying to take root in his heart. “Gildor took Súlmae’s death very hard,” he said in a monotone stripped of his true emotions. “He adored his mother, and she him. They were very close, and as you heard, he is determined to fulfill her last wish even if it makes him unhappy. You will love that boy, did you understand me? You will love him, and ensure he loves himself, and lay down your life for him if it comes to it.”

Now it was Finrod’s turn to feel outrage curdle in his belly. “Of course I will love my own son. What do you take me for?”

“You forget you are not the first Golodh I have witnessed raising a half-blood child. If Súlmae had not sworn to me you are of higher character than Maeglin’s mother, I would not even be here. I would have broken my word to my sister as she bled out in my arms if it meant saving another child from Maeglin’s fate.”

Finrod had no words for that. He had thought, assumed, Aredhel had done right by her son. He’d certainly never heard anything to the contrary from Turgon. But then, no one in their family had had any contact with Maeglin outside of Turgon so they had no second opinion on Aredhel’s son.

Regardless, he would treasure his son. The fact that Gildor was a half-blood hadn’t even registered until this moment, but of course, it would matter to the other inhabitants of Nargothrond. Maybe not if Gildor’s mother had been a Sinda of Doriath, or one of the Sindar who had integrated with the Noldor of Nargothrond, but she had not been.

Doubt creep back into the hollows of his belly. Bastard and half-blood. By the Light, what was he condemning his own son to? 

He looked back at Gildor who was now being doted on–having his hair ruffled, cheeks tweaked, and sides tickled. Gildor glowed under all the attention, laughing and darting away from the playfully fingers, and tossing little quips back when the males teased him about his nonexistent muscles. 

Gildor ate it all up. There wasn’t a shy bone in his body. That would help him. It would make it so much easier if Gildor already had a healthy confidence in himself. Finrod told himself Gildor was strong enough for what lay ahead, but in truth he couldn’t know that from a few minutes observation. 

He promised himself he would protect Gildor. He would prioritize his son, even if it meant he let some of his duties suffer. He would pick out a strong mentor for the child, maybe Gelmir, and assure Gildor was surrounded by the children of those loyal to Finrod. It would be enough, he promised himself, because it had to be.


	60. Chapter 48

The Price of Vengeance   
Chapter 48

Nan Elmoth was a memory Gildor held against his heart, but, like fog, it dissolved in his hands; the memories faded year by year as all childhood ones must. The names and faces were already beginning to blur, until only the sense of safety and love remained, clinging like stubborn barnacles lest they be forgotten like the details.

Nargothrond overshadowed Nan Elmoth as Nan Elmoth slipped between the cracks. Nargothrond was Father, and hugs like sunlight as he was tucked into bed. It was endless caverns murmuring the promise of adventures in his ear. It was the way the river water smelt, its taste, the glimpse of Father’s grinning face as he swam circles around him; the way they lay in the grass after and Father’s voice like music told him about a city of peals and beaches of sand whiter than snow and a little-boy-Father who used to race his cousins in swimming competitions but never quite beat the one called Fingon. 

Nargothrond was sneaking onto the supply wagons heading North with his best, forever friend Rístang, and planning how they’d hide among the grain sacks and cotton bushels until they reached the exciting North and got to meet the High King and the warriors of song who guarded the world from the Terrible Monster King of Orcs. It was sitting through dull lessons and passing notes to Rístang as they snickered behind their hands. It was following his cousin Gwindor around like a faithful puppy, and begging with huge eyes until his hero consented to teach him how to hold a sword like a proper Noldo. It was lying on the thrush rugs while Gelmir sang a clever rhyme he’d composed to help keep the Sindar lords’ lineages from tangling together in Gildor’s head.

Nargothrond was home.

Rístang’s face was flushed, her defiant, straight, black hair whipping behind her as she skidded to a stop before the crouching Gildor. “I just heard! Dwarves! They’re coming up the East Road now. If we’re quick, we can watch the Wardens cast the bridge!”

“Come on then, hurry!” Gildor grabbed Rístang’s hand, and pulled her along as they wove their way up from the deeper caverns near the kitchens towards the upper caverns and Tower Doors of Nargothrond City.

“I heard their toys are better than even the Fëanorion caravans’!” Rístang said as they darted around kitchen maids laden down with food trays, and laundresses hauling soiled garments to the wash rooms. They nearly sent a smaller boy crashing to the floor, but his mother scooped him up in time and yelled a scolding at their running backs. They had to slow down when they reached the upper caverns where the Important People were (the ones who would snitch to Father about Gildor, and Father would get that frown on his face that sometimes meant Gildor had disappointed him and sometimes meant people Father didn’t like were pestering him, but both meant Gildor had cause Father trouble).

“I heard,” Gildor yelled as they wove through a gaggle of off-duty guards, just side-stepping being thrown to the ground by a man who’d lunged forward to swat another guard on the head as they played of cards, “the Dwarves have magic pots that fold up, all small like, until they’re no bigger than a dinner plate! And I heard they have magic oil that lets them breathe fire! _And,_ ” he plowed on at Rístang’s disbelieving look, “I heard they can talk to stones, and the stones talk back!”

“That’s a bunch of nonsense,” Rístang scoffed. “Rocks don’t talk. You’ve been listening to too much kitchen gossip.”

“I have not,” Gildor’s chest puffed up. “Cousin Gelmir told me that, about the rocks, and he knows _everything_.”

Rístang rolled her eyes. “Nobody knows everything.” 

Gildor huffed, but let Rístang continue in ignorance about the stones; Rístang just didn’t know Gelmir like he did. Gelmir was _never_ wrong. “Dwarves really do breathe fire though. You’ll see.”

Rístang looked about to argue, but never got the chance. They had grown careless in their disagreement, and failed to keep a sharp eye-out in these upper halls as they knew to do. Ill-luck had them running across the path of a group of Gildor’s former schoolmates. 

Father said, _Children can be cruel, sweetheart. I am sorry you had to learn this lesson so soon._

But Gelmir said, _Grown-up are just as cruel. They have just learned to hide it better. But when one of the other children are cruel to you Gildor, I want you to remember that they do not understand what they are saying; they are just repeating words they heard their parents say when no one else was listening. That doesn’t make it any less hurtful, I know, but try to play a little game in your head. Imagine parrots in their place, and maybe you can walk away with a smile all their squawking cannot touch._

Gildor never could do as Gelmir said. It just didn’t work! But he wasn’t stupid (no matter what they said), and didn’t snitch. He knew what snitching would get him (he just wanted someone to be his friend).

In the end he hadn’t needed to snitch. Father pulled him out of the elite school he’d been attending, reserved for the children of the Important People, and enrolled him in a day-school for commoners’ children.

There he met his first friend in Nargothrond, Rístang, and many others besides, all from less Important families. Most were craftsman and tradesmen children, but some, like Rístang’s family, were so poor they got their meals from the King’s Bowl.

“Look who it is! The King’s Bastard and his side-kick the Beggar Girl,” one of the boy’s crowed.

Gildor’s fingernails bit into his palms. He knew he should try to walk away (it was what Gelmir kept telling him), but ignoring them was just so hard to do.

“I don’t think it’s a girl,” another of the boy’s sneered, “looks more like a lost dog to me. You know, because of the way it trails after its master? I bet it’s hungry and looking for scraps. Its family couldn’t afford to feed it, after all.”

Rístang flung herself on the boy with a battle cry. Gildor didn’t hesitate to join his friend. The bullies may have been about their age and size, but there were five of them, and Rístang, hot-tempered and not thinking about the odds, had never been good at this kind of fighting.

Gildor had only gotten in two good hits and one belly pinch, before large hands on his shoulders pulled him back, and a familiar voice shouted: “That is enough! All of you!”

The large hands released Gildor to catch Rístang who hadn’t listened and was still trying to kick the rich boys in the shins. But it was only the work of a moment before Rístang was yanked off as well. The gruff voice belonging to the large hands sent the bullies running off with a few promises of telling the ‘hooligans’ mothers if they didn’t scamper. 

Then the chastising tongue turned on Gildor and Rístang. “What were you thinking? How many times must you be told, Gildor: you have to control yourself!” Belegund turned his black eyes on Gildor with a disappointed look that hung all the heavier off his thick, dark brows, and given Belegund was a grown-up now, he was able to loom impressively over them. 

But they had only been defending themselves! “You didn’t hear what they said!” 

“It does not matter what they said. You need to stop and _think_. You are too impulsive. You should not let what someone says get under your skin like that. It is only giving them what they want.”

Gildor looked away. He saw Beren trailing in Belegund’s shadow as he always did, and staring at Gildor. Gildor narrowed his eyes at him, daring him to snicker. Beren’s eyes darted away when Gildor looked at him, and he inched closer to his elder cousin. 

Belegund turned on Rístang next. “And you should know better! You are older than Gildor, Rístang, and should not be following his bad example! You—”

“But they said—”

“They are ignorant children puffed up with their own importance. Whatever nonsense they were spewing should not _matter_.”

“You don’t understand!” Rístang hissed through her teeth. “They dishonored my family!”

Belegund sighed. “Nothing they said could possibly dishonor your family, Rístang. Only _your_ actions have that power.”

“Aargh!” Rístang kicked the wall. “You’re as bad as a Golodh! You don’t understand _anything_!”

“Don’t use that word!” Belegund barked. 

Rístang’s face was still flushed with anger, but she dropped her eyes. To refer to a Noldo as a Golodh was almost as bad as calling a non-Noldo a Moriquende. 

“Well,” Belegund said, voice returning to its usual tones, the ones that rumbled like boulders sliding down a mountainside, “let us hope you both use your heads before your fists next time.” He patted Gildor on the head, but Rístang jerked away from his reach and scuffed the ground with her boot, glowering out at the world. Belegund watched her a moment before turning to Gildor with a smile. “So, what mischief are you two off to?” 

“We’re off to see the Dwarves!” Gildor grabbed Belegund’s arm, and hung off him, “Come with us!”

Belegund was one of his favorite people in Nargothrond when Belegund wasn’t trying to make him act more grown-up. Gildor didn’t think he’d ever be able to walk away from an insult like Belegund could. Gildor just hadn’t been made like that, and since he would never be a king, he didn’t see what was so wrong with letting his heart rule him.

“The Dwarves, ay?” Belegund slid a look over his shoulder at his younger cousin, still hovering in his shadow. “What do you say Beren? Would you like to see some Dwarves?”

“All right,” Beren whispered, offering a tentative smile at Belegund, eyes shining up at his strong cousin.

“The Dwarves it is, then.” 

“Yes!” Gildor jumped up and down.

Belegund laughed and slung an arm over Beren’s shoulders. He led the way, towing Beren along. “This is the first Dwarven caravan in years. The only other one I saw came a few months after I arrived from Dorthonion, so pay attention Beren, you might not get another chance to see Dwarves before you head home.”

Beren nodded, soaking up all Belegund’s words and hogging Belegund all to himself. Why did Belegund like Beren so much? Belegund hadn’t seen Beren in years before Beren came to foster in Nargothrond! 

Gildor wished Beren had stayed in Dorthonion. If Beren had never come to Nargothrond, Father would not have spent night after night singing Beren to sleep when Father could have been singing and telling bedtime stories to _Gildor_. 

Father belonged to _him_. Wasn’t it enough Gildor had to share him with all of Nargothrond when Father was King? Now he had to share his Gildor Time with this other boy as well.

They spilled out of the last corridor and into the Tower Doors’ cavern that was so big a whole lake could have fit inside it! The walls were hung with Father’s banners, the harp on a field of green trimmed in gold, and the sunburst of House Finarfin. Gildor could have painted his uncles’ banners, the High King’s, Fingon’s and Gwindor’s father Guilin’s, and King Thingol’s and the Fëanorions’ too. But there were dozens and dozens of lords and ladies sworn to Father and how was he supposed to memorize all of them when they were so _boring_?

Guards, in their shinning suit of mail, stood at attention before the three massive doors, and sunlight poured in a waterfall from the many arrow slots and eye-holes in the Tower Doors. The cave network had pulled to its mouth, and the Noldor –and the Dwarves, Father said he must never forget the Dwarves— had carved the mighty towers into the hill face.

The three doors had been thrown open, and Gildor ran on ahead, eager to greet the sun. It glared hot and heavy in the summer-blue sky, and it took a moment (as it always did when coming up from the deep caverns) for his eyes to adjust to the sudden brightness. But soon he was skipping like mountain goat down the walled, stone walkway cut into the hill’s side. The walkway was deep enough to permit a wagon to pass with two full grown men on either side, but the walls rimming it were high, and blocked the view of the river gorge below.

As they neared the river, Gildor looked back at Belegund and Beren lagging behind, having not indulged themselves in Gildor and Rístang’s skipping race. Both their heads were mops of black curls hair, and their olive-skinned faces were dominated by the same hawk-like nose and heavy brows. Belegund’s arm still rested about his cousin like a shield of protection. Gildor looked away (why couldn’t _he_ have an older brother?). 

Nargothrond loomed behind them, and the river roared like an angry bear in the gorge ahead. Its waters ran low this late in the summer, not swelling the ravine as they did in the spring which Father said made it unnavigable for the boats now dotting the river. 

The boats pushed against the swift current, their sails straining, and their hulls sunk deep with cargoes of grains, salt, cotton, honey, and fruits from the southern provinces. All goods went North to the brave soldiers fighting the evil King of Orcs.

They reached the base of the High Wall just in time to watch the city guards lower the wooden bridge to the waiting Wardens. It took a _long_ time, with lots of shouted orders, complicated pulleys and towering, but it was still exciting! The bridge had only been lowered a handful of times since he came to live with Father in Nargothrond. Small parties and messengers from the Nargothrond’s eastern providences crossed the River Narog by boat at the main docks in the south where the cargo boats were loaded for their journey North. 

The sun passed its zenith and beat down on their heads, and their mouths dried up as the hour ticked by. Belegund had bought them water and some blackberries and sunflower seeds from the merchants who’d taken advantage of the sizable crowd gathered to watch the bridge lowering. 

Gildor had found a favorable spot on the High Wall, and suffered through the indignity of Belegund lifting him like a baby for the chance of a better view. Rístang was not able to swallow her pride, so was left leaning against the wall, toeing a stone in boredom and spitting out sunflower shells. Gildor kicked his feet, picking at his handkerchief of blackberries and watching as a smaller boy sailed one of the Telerin kites through the air, its billowing crimson silk whipping like the fish it resembled across the sky.

Gildor scowled when Beren climbed up beside him on the wall, the taller boy needing no hoist up from Belegund. Beren’s soft ‘Hello, Gildor,’ forced Gildor to scrub the displeasure off his face. He couldn’t bring himself to smile at Beren (as that would have been false and Gildor would not _lie_ ), but as Beren had never actually done something terrible, he decided it wouldn’t be fair to scowl at him.

By the time the bridge had finally been secured with thick ropes on the eastern banks, and the Dwarves began leading their laden carts across, Gildor had gotten up and down from his seat so many times he’d lost count. He’d eaten all his blackberries and promptly lost the handkerchief when he’d tried to play a game with it and the wind carried it into the river gorge. He’d joined the kite-flying boy for a time before losing interest in that too. He’d started a hopscotch game with Rístang and then badgered Belegund into getting out his dice and played a few rounds before this too had grown dull. 

Belegund had set him back up on the wall by Beren who hadn’t moved once while Gildor had flittered about like a restless bumblebee. Belegund had given him another scolding about being ‘well behaved’ when out. Forced to stay seated, Gildor had finally grown bored enough to overcome his dislike and speak to Beren. The result just confirmed what Gildor had already known: Beren was _boring_. He hadn’t had any good adventures; he didn’t get into trouble of any kind; he wasn’t clever like Rístang in their lessons, and the only thing he wanted to talk about was his home in Dorthonion (and _Gildor’s_ father, but Gildor didn’t want to hear how much Beren liked Father, and he never ever wanted to hear about all the kind, _special_ things Father said to _Beren_ ).

Thankfully the Dwarves had started becoming interesting again. Gildor squinted at them, trying to decide which one he wanted to talk to first. Their carts and wagons were pulled by strange ox-like creatures Gildor knew lived in the mountains from his studies, but couldn’t remember the name of. The Dwarves themselves either walked or rode ponies. 

They had just as much hair as he remembered. He’d thought Human beards curious things, but those were nothing to these mammoth things tinkling with jewels and beads and beaten metal that sung like shell-chimes in the wind. Some of the Dwarves wore helms carved like wild beasts–bear jaws and the rippling scales of snakes—with armor shinning as brightly as any Elf’s, and forged with strange patterns, shapes, and runes. 

The Dwarves seemed to take _forever_ to cross the bridge, but finally the first ones stepped foot on the western bank, and Gildor jumped down to get a closer look, Rístang and Beren trailing after him. He spotted one Dwarf whose helm was crowned with a massive horn, a sword strapped to his back, and the most amazing facial markings in the world! The Dwarf’s beard was cropped clean off his cheeks and only sprouting from his chin and upper lip. On his cheeks and crawling up his neck and curling around his lower eye-sockets, were blue markings inked directly onto his skin.

Gildor wasted no time squirming his way through the crowd to introduce himself. He simply _had_ to meet this Dwarf. He made sure to use his best manners (the ones he’d been forced to practice over and over again for dinners with Important people) when introducing himself to his Dwarf. “Well met, Master Dwarf!” He twisted his wrist on his left breast and offered a small bow. “I am Gildor of Nargothrond!” As a bastard, proper manners forbade him from naming his father, but he shook off the shadow of pain its lack cast over him. 

His Dwarf huffed and brushed right passed him. “If you want to greet a Khuzd, Elf-child, then learn to do it properly, without all the flowers and pomp.” Gildor’s jaw dropped as he watched his Dwarf march off. 

Dwarves were so exciting! He ran after his Dwarf. “Wait, Master Dwarf! Where can I learn the right greeting?”

His Dwarf did not stop or hesitate on his unwavering stalk to the base of the High Wall. “Master Dwarf!” Gildor kept up the chase until he lost sight of his Dwarf in the press of bodies. His Dwarf was the most distinguished and regal of them all! 

He was just turning back to look for Rístang who’d been separated from him, when he spotted a familiar face. “Cousin Gelmir!” He ran over to his cousin. Gelmir looked over at Gildor’s call from where he’d been waiting by the High Wall’s mouth, hands clasped behind his back in a stance Gildor recognized as his ‘waiting one’ from the many hours Gelmir spend shadowing Father as his sworn-companion.

Gelmir’s mouth turned up in a fleeting smile when he spotted Gildor barreling towards him. He caught Gildor around the waist as Gildor’s momentum sent him plowing into Gelmir’s legs. “Ooof, careful there, these bones aren’t as limber as they once were,” Gelmir teased. His hair, black as a raven’s beak, had slipped off his shoulders to curtain them as he steadied Gildor.

Gildor laughed in delight at the lucky meeting. Gelmir was his favorite person in all Nargothrond! Well, after just Father. “Did you see the Dwarves?” he asked excitedly.

“Yes, I saw them,” Gelmir’s mouth twitched as Gildor bounced on his toes.

“But did you _see_ them? Did you see their helms and their mail shirts? Did you see their ponies? I wish I had a pony like theirs! Do you think Father will get me one for my Birthing Day? Did you see my Dwarf? He’s the best of them all! Did you see his markings? They were blue and they were painted right on top of his skin! Do you think Father will let me get markings like that?”

Gelmir just hummed at him, straightening Gildor’s tunic and brushing off some of the dirt on his sleeves. His fingers stilled as they picked up Gildor’s hands and all the nice lines around his mouth and eyes that told Gildor he was smiling inside, tightened. “What is this?”

Gildor glanced down at his hands, and the broken skin of his knuckles and the splatters of dried blood. “Nothing.” He pulled his hands back, looking everywhere but Gelmir’s eyes.

“You have been fighting again, haven’t you?” 

Gildor’s shoulders twitched. “Maybe,” he mumbled.

“Why must this continue, Gildor? If someone is bothering you, you must tell us.”

“It’s nothing!”

“If it is nothing, then you have no business getting into fights over it,” Gelmir twisted his argument around.

Gildor’s head shot up, “That’s not fair!”

Gelmir raise his brow, “Is it not?”

Gildor opened his mouth to tell him exactly what terrible things the bullies had been saying, before snapping it closed. “You tried to trick me!” 

“If you say so,” Gelmir replied without even a glimmer of guilt.

“What are you doing here anyway?”

Gelmir’s eyes swept passed Gildor’s pouty face and out over the gathering of Dwarves and Elves. “Gwindor was to ride in with the Dwarven party. I came down to greet him.”

“Gwindor?” Gildor’s head snapped around, pout forgotten at word of his hero’s coming. “Do you see him? Do you?” He craned his neck around, jumping up on his tip-toes to try and get a better view.

“Not yet,” Gelmir said. “But I do see your friend there. And there are Finrod’s fosterlings with her. I think they are looking for you.”

“Oh, Rístang? Could you wave at them, and then maybe they’ll see us,” Gildor asked eagerly, almost running in circles around Gelmir in his impatience to see Gwindor again.

Gelmir did as Gildor asked with a touch of amusement around his mouth, though the expression was not quite a smile. Gelmir’s mouth didn’t like wearing smiles. 

Gildor rushed over to Rístang when he spied her, intent on telling his best friend about Gwindor’s coming. Rístang was mildly appreciative, but didn’t share Gildor’s vibrating anticipation. Gildor was disappointed Rístang was still not as in love with Gwindor as he was, but was used to Rístang’s reaction by now. Rístang, unlike Gildor, wanted to be something boring but terribly clever when she finished her studies, and so did not follow Gwindor around for stories and sword lessons as Gildor did. 

Rístang never answered Gildor’s questions to his satisfaction about what this mysterious something was, and he didn’t understand the hungry look lighting up her face when she said: “I’m going to be something _more_. Something _better_.” It had to do with Rístang’s family. They were poor, Gildor knew this much, but Rístang shut-up like a clam shell whenever talk turned to them.

Gildor was going to be a hero like Gwindor. He would ride off to battle in the North alongside High King Fingolfin, and win all the battles and rescue prisoners from Evil Morgoth like cousin Fingon! 

Most of the Dwarves were already climbing the steep path up to the Tower Doors by the time Gelmir spotted Gwindor. Gwindor rode his large war horse, but had only his sword strapped to his side and none of his gleaming armor on. He kept leaning down in his saddle to speak with the Dwarf who rode beside him on a pony, and it took a terribly long time before he saw them all waiting for him. When he did, he smiled his best smile, the one that made Gildor think of windows and sunrises, and urged his horse into a canter. 

Gwindor leapt off his horse before it had even properly stopped, landing graceful as a mountain lion. Gelmir mumbled something about ‘show-off,’ which made Gwindor laugh and grab his brother. Gwindor clasped Gelmir in a hug, to Gelmir’s protest, laughing again (Gwindor was always laughing) before releasing him.

“Well, Brother, I am here at last,” Gwindor said, reaching over to ruffle Gildor’s hair. 

“We could not have survived another moment of your absence,” Gelmir said dryly.

“Oh Gelmir, always teasing me!” Gwindor winked at Gildor which made Gildor beam.

“We missed you, Cousin!” Gildor cried, hanging onto Gwindor’s big hand with both of his.

“Did you, now?” Gwindor chuckled, pulling Gildor into a side-embrace, and then, right when Gildor was relaxing into the warmth, sneaking his fingers down to tickle his ribs. Gildor shrieked with laughter. 

“Don’t get him all wound up before supper. You know what a little terror he turns into.” Gelmir said, but the lines around his eyes were smiling.

Gwindor released Gildor from his torture, only to swing Gildor up into the air, startling a half-laugh half-cry out of him. “Put me down! I’m not a baby!”

“What is that?” Gwindor asked, “Did you say you were still a baby? All right, little one, don’t fear, I will help you. I will just have toooo carry you!” And with that he flung Gildor over his shoulder and anchored him there with an arm wrapped around the back of Gildor’s thighs.

“Put me down! Put me down!” Gildor laughed and whined, pummeling his cousin’s back with his fists.

“Belegund, well met,” Gwindor said, pretending he couldn’t hear the boy he had slung over his shoulder.

“Lord Gwindor,” Belegund returned.

“Why, you are a man already!” Gwindor exclaimed, having not had call to visit Nargothrond City in long months. “You must be due home soon.”

“Yes, I will return in the spring.”

“And who is this?” Gwindor asked as Gildor yanked on his hair to be put down, only to receive a slap on his bottom.

Beren’s eyes were huge in his face as he stared up at Gwindor, naked awe in his eyes. Gwindor cut an impressive figure, even out of armor. He was strong of body, with powerful arms and a trim waist that was thickened with more muscle than the typical Elf. His hair, bright as beaten metal in the sunshine, swept back in the traditional braids of a warrior which were rarely seen around Nargothrond now the Sindarin style of loose hair was favored both in court and out. 

His eyes carried the warmth of his big heart, and it was these which had Beren smiling back bashfully. “I am Beren, son of Barahir. Belegund is my father’s brother-son.”

“How are you finding Nargothrond so far?”

Beren ducked his head. “Well. King Finrod has been very kind to me, my lord.” The tips of the boy’s ears reddened and Gwindor’s smile widened.

“Our king is very easy to love. You would not be the first son of Bëor to find a second-father in him. There is no shame in it.” Gildor sucked in a breath from where he hung, and stilled his struggles as he felt a spear of pain enter his chest.

“And what of you, Brother?” Gelmir asked, and Gwindor left the others behind to step beside Gelmir who’d turned towards the walkway leading up to the Towers. “How did you find the journey…and the company?” He finished with a sly glance.

Gwindor huffed. “Just because I have not your interest in scholarly pursuits, does not mean I am a thick-skulled fool who will put his foot in his mouth the moment I open it!”

Gelmir laughed softly, “I said nothing of the sort.”

“You were thinking it,” Gwindor shot back, but his mouth curled in a smile. “All right, all right! So I _may_ have insulted one of two of the Dwarves, but Eru, Gelmir! I have never met a people so easy to take up insult! I was being careful –no stop laughing, I was!—and I was hardly the only one in our party to offend them by accident, and the Dwarves were hardly innocent of guilt!” Gelmir was laughing outright now. “Thank The One such minor offences are easily assuaged! Can you imagine the debacle it would have caused if the Dwarves of Nogrod had left in a huff before they had even arrived at Nargothrond? The poor water pipes would never have been mended and the cooks would have put my name down on their blacklists!”

“Oh Brother, I do not think it would have come to that,” Gelmir tried to comfort, but since he was still snickering it sounded terribly insincere.

“Next time a troupe of Dwarves comes up the East Road I will not volunteer to be an escort, and then we shall see how you like it! Father and I have been so swamped with work, I would not have been able to get away to visit if the Dwarves had not given me the perfect excuse.”

Gelmir sobered and bumped his shoulder with Gwindor’s, “You know I always look forward to your visits.” Gwindor hummed his forgiveness. “Now set that little terror down before all his blood gets stuck in his head and you really find yourself on someone’s blacklist.” 

Gwindor laughed, and did as Gelmir asked.

*

The room was silent but for the gentle scratching of quills on parchment from where two child-heads bent over their schoolwork, the rustle of a page turning, and the soft humming of his sister Beleth as she worked. 

Belegund knew it wouldn’t last. Sure enough, he hadn’t even finished his current page on the treaties of Prince Finrod of Minas Tirith and Lord Cirdan of The Falas and the Establishment of Nargothrond, before the tapping started up. It began with a click-click-click of Gildor’s fingernails against the wood of his desk, then moved to a restless boot taking up the rhythm, expanding and strengthening whatever melody ran through the boy’s head. Then the fidgeting and squirming began in earnest, and Belegund suppressed a sigh. 

He marked his place with one finger before sliding his eyes over to where Gelmir labored over his own work. 

“Give him another few minutes,” Gelmir said quietly. “I would like him to finish that essay.” 

“You know he cannot sit still when its history. He can only make it this long for mathematics,” Belegund whispered back, but it wasn’t quiet enough, and he saw Gildor’s shoulders twitch as his knee bounced faster.

Rístang’s head was bent next to Gildor, an eye of serenity next to her friend’s restlessness. Rístang’s quill scratched furiously as she raced to put down her thoughts, hand flying over the parchment and her face bowed so low her nose nearly dipped into the ink. Gildor’s own hands were hardly idle; they simply were not bent to the task at hand. One hand continued to tap out a rhythm on the wood, while the other picked at his quill as Gildor’s eyes wandered around the room no-where near the essay he was supposed to be completing.

Belegund’s gaze flickered over to his sister. A frown wormed between her brows and she’d taken her shinny rock out of its pocket and started spinning it. If Gildor didn’t stop disturbing her, she’d soon send her hands fluttering about in patterns, like moths dancing in the moonlight.

“He is brothering Beleth,” Belegund whispered.

Gelmir glanced up at Beleth, noting the rock that had migrated out of its customary pocket. “Very well,” he conceded. “Gildor, you may take a break.”

Gildor shot up as if he’d landed on a beehive. “Thank you, Gelmir!” He started running to the door before Belegund’s sharp ‘Gildor!’ yanked him into a walk again. Gildor cast a guilty look back at Beleth who had pressed her palms over her ears at all the commotion.

Belegund couldn’t really blame Gildor from forgetting; it had been his choice to limit the boy’s interaction with Beleth over the years. It wasn’t that he believed Gildor would be cruel, but Gildor was just so _much_. He was spilling over with life and energy, and Beleth needed quiet and peace. Gildor was a hurricane, and Beleth couldn’t handle a few rain droplets.

Gildor was off now, running down the corridor and burning off some of that boundless energy. It was a system Gelmir and Finrod had forged together as Gildor fell further and further behind in his studies. The boy wasn’t simple-minded; he simply couldn’t concentrate for ten minutes strung together. So a running break had been worked into his studies for when he became too restless. At school, his teacher sent him into a back corner to jump around or toss a ball before rejoining the class. Everyone knew Gildor only received these privileges because of his birth. The child of a commoner would have been expected to ‘sit still and stop misbehaving,’ but Finrod hadn’t cared if it smacked of favoritism as long as his son’s studies improved (which they had, up to a point).

As a rule, Belegund did not allow Gildor to study with Beleth in the room, but he’d made an exception today as he’d promised to take the boys with him when he went down to see the Dwarves at the forges. Beleth had asked to go, and Belegund was not in a habit of denying his sister anything. She had suffered enough in her life. What was a visit to Dwarves compared to what he could not give her? 

Gildor came back from his run, cheeks flushed and blue eyes leaking that singular intensity Belegund associate with Gildor and Finrod. His father had once told him, before being sent to foster in Nargothrond (Beleth trailing along with him for ‘healing’ his parents said, but they all knew it was an excuse to wash their hands of their ‘sick’ daughter), that Finrod had this way about him. Finrod made you breathe faster, charge harder, attempt greater, dream higher. Die sooner.

Finrod lived too large, his father said. It was not the way of Men to burn so brightly. ‘I met another one of them, the Great Lords, the sons of their first king, Finwë,’ his father had confided, ‘when I visited our kin in Dor-lómin. Fingon he was called, and it was just the same with him. It’s in their eyes; that’s where you can see it. There’s something alive in them, blazing, and it will burn you up if you get too close. Remember that,’ his father had cautioned, ‘when you go to the Elves, remember that. And don’t let yourself get too close, or they’ll burn you.’

Belegund hadn’t cared. Well, at first he had. At first he’d been a wide-eyed youth clinging to his sister’s hand. He’d been just like Beren, a child adrift in a foreign land where the air didn’t smell like home and his tongue felt heavy in his mouth as it curled itself around a stranger’s language, the food had too much sugar and too little spice, and his rainbow stripped robes, tassels, _Human body_ fit all wrong inside the alien world full of alien beings. But Finrod had shown him kindness. More, he’d shown Beleth kindness, and that was worth more than all the gold in Nargothrond’s treasury. 

Belegund set down his book and moved to where his sister worked grinding willow bark, ginger, and dried herbs for healing pastes. Beleth loved the smell of herbs drying near the fire. Ever since she was a girl, she would go out into the woods where all was quiet and there were no children she was ever failing to understand, and collect basketfuls of wormwood, rosemary, and basil. Brewing elixirs, balms, and poultices was one of the few things she took true pleasure in –that and playing her lyre.

Beleth turned to greet him with a sweet smile, her face tipped up like a blossoming flower with her curls framing her face. Her eyes did not meet his though (they so rarely did). They darted away like sun-shy fish. 

She clapped her hands, pulling him closer. “Hello, Belli! See what I made!” With a pointing finger she named the healing paste she’d been preparing. “Good for buns, yes, yes, yes!” She clapped. She was five years his senior, but she had always been his to protect. 

He bent and kissed her left temple, feeling her soft curls against his nose and smelling lilacs and the strong aroma of ginger. She giggled, “Itchy, Belli!” She tickled his beard with her fingertips, and then darted in to kiss him on the nose. “My very own Belli.” 

“My very own Beleth,” he whispered back like a secret which made her laugh again and rub her forehead against the soft fabric of his shoulder.

“Can we see the Dwarfsis now?”

He caught the movement of Gildor’s head snapping up across the room, even Rístang’s quill stilled in anticipation. “Yes, if you would like.”

She had to take a moment to think about it. “All done,” she said, pointing at her finished work.

“Yes, it is good work.”

She bit her lip, “We won’t miss suppa will we? We can’t miss suppa. We have story time with Uncle Fin after, and then baths, and then sleeps. Uh uh, we can’t miss suppa, no, no, no!”

“We won’t, I promise. Remember, I told you yesterday that we would be back in time for supper?” 

“Yes, yes! Dwarfsis and then suppa!” Beleth sprung up, clapping her hands in delight. “Let’s go!” 

Belegund shot forward and wrapped his hand around hers before she could dash out of the room and lose herself in a head-first quest to see the Dwarves. “Here we go,” he said, squeezing her hand.

Gelmir said from where he sat, buried in books and scrolls, “Gildor, Rístang, make sure to behave yourselves. I shall know if you do not,” he shot a special look up at Gildor, “be good.”

“Yes, Gelmir!” Gildor promised, already half out the door and dragging Rístang behind him.

“Gildor!” Gelmir called his back, “clean up your work space first! You have spilled your ink, and your quill is dripping all over your hard work!”

Gildor dragged his feet back into the chamber, unwilling to disobey his cousin and earn himself a very disappointed lecture from his father and a kitchen duty of scrubbing pans. “I’ll catch up!” he called after Rístang.

Belegund started them off at a leisurely pace, letting Beleth trail her fingers over the familiar walls of the Royal Wing. He rarely took her out of its sanctuary; she hated crowds. He knew she’d have at least one episode on their adventure today, as any environment with loud and numerous stimuli triggered one, but she hadn’t left the Royal Wing in months, except for her morning walks up to the surface to see the sun’s rising, but they encountered few people at that time of day. 

He hadn’t asked Beren to accompany them today, knowing Beleth would be coming. Beren was a sweet, thoughtful boy. But his head was still full of Dorthonion, both its memory and its harder ways. Beren had been young when Beleth and Belegund left Dorthonion, so the only knowledge he had of Beleth was rumors and cruel gossip. The boy had not said or done anything malicious to Beleth when he’d been introduced, but the shocked, disturbed looked on his face had been enough. Belegund was confident Beren would come to see his cousin for the gentle soul she was, but Beleth would have enough stressors this day without adding a confused boy in the mix.

Nargothrond was not innocent of narrow-mindedness either. While Finrod had been everything that was kind and noble with Beleth, their king’s example was unfortunately not the norm. Living in Nargothrond had taught Belegund a powerful lesson, one he hoped he never forgot: When one is alone, it is quite easy to deceive yourself into thinking you are a compassionate person. It was when you are forced to make sacrifices and rub shoulders with others not like yourself, when it becomes _uncomfortable_ to practice compassion, that your true face is revealed.

Nargothrond had many good people living within it, but just as many bigots and small-minded ones. When it came down to it, Elves were not so very different from Humans. Many times Belegund had watched as supposedly ‘virtuous’ Elves succumbed to vices. 

Nargothrond had a sickness growing within it, one feeding upon its ever more segregated and grasping religious sects. Those religious people who had lost themselves to everything but the drawing up of lines with one side godly and the other condemned, were like a bucketful of nuts all the meat had been scraped out of and then glued back together to look perfectly inviting on the outside, but there was nothing inside.

He watched as Beleth’s hands studied the groves in a frieze, learning the curves of a stone face with her fingers like others would their eyes. She had a smile on her face like a secret only she knew, and her head was cocked, her curls rushing down her back to nestle in the soft bow of her lower spine. 

Belegund worried. He worried for his future and his sister’s future. What would become of Beleth when he returned home in the spring? Would he ever see her again if she remained safe, here, in Nargothrond? Was he selfless enough to leave her behind?

He turned when he heard the rush of Gildor’s feet against the stones. He must speak with Gildor. He’d put it off, hoping things would sort themselves out, but they hadn’t. 

He’d first noticed the tension between Beren and Gildor some weeks ago, and wondered. Beren was not the kind of child to collect strife. He was soft-spoken, and more than a little insecure. Gildor was no more given to meanness. He was a kind boy at heart, which made the glint of resentment in Gildor’s eyes when he looked upon Beren all the harder to comprehend. 

“Gildor,” he called as the boy finally caught up, “come walk with me.” 

Gildor scampered up to him, face a war of confusion and pleasure to be so singled out. Gildor was too easy to read. He wore his whole soul on his skin for anyone to see. Belegund could not approve. 

Gildor may be Finrod’s illegitimate son, but with no other legitimate heirs to content with, Gildor had a place in Nargothrond politics. An heir he may never be, but he had Finrod’s ear and love, and as he grew older the nobles would try to use this.

Gildor’s hair slipped out like a cloud running behind him, unbound and free of even the simplest adornments. Gildor had a terrible habit of picking at braids or any other ornament left vulnerable in his hair. He was wearing his play clothes, the ones he’d ruined already with grass stains and patched holes in the elbows and knees. Belegund had the brief thought to send him back to change into something more appropriate for King Finrod’s son, but dismissed it. Gildor would be Gildor; he would get into some mischief with the Dwarves because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Dolled up in fancy clothes and gold hair ribbons wouldn’t change that. 

“Have you seen the Dwarves at the forges yet?” Gildor’s voice echoed off the corridor’s cavern walls. “Do you think they are down their making sword and helmets of legend right now? Do you think we’ll get to see them forging things? Have you met my Dwarf? He’s got marks, _tattoos_ —Gelmir told me they are called tattoos—on his face! I want some tattoos. Do you think they will give me some if I ask nicely? Did you know when you talk to a Dwarf you’re supposed to—”

“ _Gildor_ ,” Belegund cut off the stream of questions. Gildor’s mouth clicked shut, and he turned big, eager eyes up at Belegund. Only Gildor wouldn’t be upset to be interrupted mid-question, Belegund thought with a spark of fondness for the exuberant child. He was probably used to it by now. Chattering about whatever popped into his head was a habit of Gildor’s and one that, while endearing at times like this, was often tiresome.

“Why don’t you like Beren,” Belegund decided to be blunt. It usually worked best if you got to the point with Gildor before his mind wandered off into something more interesting.

Gildor didn’t try to deny it. He wouldn’t have been able to pull off a lie even if he’d tried; the child was hopeless at guile. But he didn’t answer either, only shrugged. 

Belegund was tempted to get angry over the infantile response. He could be patient though, something he’d learned with Beleth and often had to employ around Gildor. He went for the less direct route. “Do you remember when I first came to Nargothrond?”

Gildor perked up right away. “Yes! I was _so_ little! That first day, Father brought you in and you introduced yourself and I did me, and then Father got out the Special Toys, the ones that came all the way from Valinor where Father grew up, and he let us play with them on the rug together!” 

“That is right,” Belegund nodded. “But I bet you did not know that before Uncle Finrod brought me in to meet you, he had found me crying in the Sunset Garden.” Gildor’s eyes went huge. “I had snuck in there because it was one of the few places in Nargothrond where the sun shines down from the surface, and feeling the sunlight on my skin made me feel closer to home. When Uncle came in, I tried to pretend I was having a reaction to the asphodel and wasn’t really crying, but Uncle saw right through me. He sat down on the bench next to me and let me put my head in his lap even though I covered his tunic in snot,” Belegund laughed at the memory. “He touched my hair, just like my mother used to, and sung a song that spun pictures of home in my head. It was the first time I had ever heard Elven music, and I had never experienced anything like it. I was convinced Uncle was one of the Maiar in disguise!”

Gildor laughed, enthralled.

“Do you remember what it was like when you first came to live here, Gildor?”

Gildor’s expression sobered immediately. “Yes,” he admitted softly. “I…at first I didn’t want to come.” He said it like some terrible secret, and Belegund had to smile.

“Yes, it is scary coming to a new place, meeting new people, and having no one you know with you, no familiar places to escape to.” Gildor nodded. “I bet Beren feels a lot like you did right now. He doesn’t have his mother or father or his home. He doesn’t even have any friends. All he has is me, and I am rather old to be his best friend, don’t you think?” Gildor’s head dropped, and his shoulders hunched in on themselves like bird’s wings. “I think Beren could use a friend, don’t you? He must be lonely.”

“Yes,” Gildor whispered to his hands. Then he squirmed, “But…”

“Yes?”

“Father keeps singing to him and giving his hugs and tucking him in! And, and what if Father decided he likes Beren better than me!” Gildor burst out in a wail.

“Well, do you think Uncle loves me more than you?”

Gildor hesitated, “No…but Father really does love you!” 

Belegund laughed, “I know.” Then, more seriously, “Uncle has had a great many fosterling boys like me and Beren. But he has only had _one_ son.” He pointed a finger in Gildor’s chest, “You.”

A smile flirted with Gildor’s mouth, “Yes, just one me.”

“Yes, just one you.”

“I guess I could be friends with Beren, do you think?” 

“I think that would be a very good thing, indeed.” Gildor grinned at the approval, both his dimples flashing in the full smile. Belegund rubbed Gildor’s head, musing his pale hair, though Gildor didn’t seem to mind the mess. “Off with you, now! You are letting Rístang have all the fun up at the front.”

Gildor bolted off like an explosion at the very idea Rístang would have fun without him. Belegund shook his head at the boy, and wandered over to Beleth who was still learning the walls as she crept forward at a snail’s pace. Belegund didn’t mind.


	61. Chapter 49

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Celebrimbor’s father-name is Curufinwë, and Curufin refers to him as such in his head, but calls him by his preferred mother-name when speaking.

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 49

Year 455 of the First Age, plains northwest of the Forest of Brethil

A column of displaced people stretched behind them. Bedraggled but stubborn, bent with soul-grief, some with yet unhealed wounds from Orc-swords, wolves-teeth, and Dragon-fire, women and children and warriors alike, they pressed on. Their home had been sacked and defiled after months of struggling against the Black One’s hammer-stroke. 

With insufficient supplies and in a harried retreat (just escaping a rout by sheer power of their lords’ wills), they were forced from the Pass of Aglon. The enemy had been too many, and they could not cut their way east to where the rest of the Fëanorions fought like desperate, drowning swimmers struggling to keep their heads up in a storm. Maedhros was besieged in Himring, Maglor’s cavalry slaughter on the plains and forced to abandon Thand Barad, Canarthir’s fortress had also been breached and its people left to retreat south to Amrod and Amras’ lands which were also infested with Orcs and made for a dangerous crossing.

Celegorm and Curufin’s people could not break through the enemy horde cutting them off from their brothers, and had to turn west. Melian’s girdle shunned them (wounded, children, and all) just as they knew it would, but they had been desperate to avoid the Valley of Dreadful Death. Yet with no other recourse, they had braved the dark road, and suffered for it.

Now, finally, they had gained the plains of Sirion’s valley and left the terror behind (exchanging too many good warriors for nightmares that would fester long in their minds). The lesser Palantíri the two sons of Fëanor had clung to as their only window back to the brothers, no longer unlocking the beloved faces as the distance became too great. The greater Palantir their fortress had hosted perished in the Dragon-fire that devoured all they had labored to build. For Curufin its loss was a greater blow than that of their home, for it was one more piece of their father consumed down Morgoth’s ravenous gullet.

Celegorm looked at his brother riding at his side. Curufin’s shoulders were not curled, his face unbowed, no outward sign could be seen of this latest blow, but Celegorm had seen Curufin’s face when the tower fell, the Palantír within. 

There had been something in the bones about his eyes, as if Curufin looked into the naked-eye of a nightmare he was helpless to wake from. For one trembling moment Celegorm had seen the obsessive loyalty to Fëanor that had held up Curufin’s corpse-sag body after Fëanor burned, fail Curufin. In that moment Curufin had looked like a man expecting to die, and welcoming it. But then the look was gone, subjugated under Curufin’s indomitable will, his absolute conviction to continue living in Fëanor’s name. Fëanor (the Fëanor in Curufin’s head) would never have let despair rule him, so Curufin could not either.

Celegorm would have wept for the person Curufin had once been (before he’d set himself aside to become Fëanor’s legacy) if it would have benefited anything at all. 

“We should cut north, for Hithlum,” Celegorm advised, but did not order. Curufin would make the final decision as he always did. 

Curufin’s lip curled as if he’d smelt something foul. “I will not go begging to _High King_ Fingolfin for charity. Besides,” he clenched his decision, “we have to assume all the Northern lands are now under Morgoth’s dominion.”

Celegorm nodded, agreeing with this logic. They knew Angrod and Aegnor had fallen with most of their people in the first surge of Morgoth’s power that winter. It was late-summer now, and if the sons of Fëanor had been unable to hold against Morgoth, then Fingolfin had surly failed. “Where then? We cannot skirt all of Doriath and come back to Amon Ereb by the south. We have not the supplies and our people are exhausted.”

“We will go south,” Curufin said decisively. “We have entered Finrod’s lands, and rumor says he has some hidden fortress. We will winter there, and set out again in the spring.”

Celegorm snapped his brother a look, but Curufin’s face was smooth as quiet waters, pretending confidence Celegorm could not credit him for. They both knew Finrod was unlikely to welcome them as guests in his halls. They had never been close to Finarfin’s children in Valinor, and after the Helcaraxë… 

“An ingenious plan, to be sure,” Celegorm drawled.

The bones in Curufin’s face sharpened. “I do not care for your sarcasm, brother. This is hardly the time, or did you forget we have 804 wounded, 253 children, 4,087 women, 2,245 men—”

“All right!” Celegorm growled. “Yes, you are so very clever, thank you for coming up with a foil-proof plan for our people’s survival.”

Curufin sneered, “Your thanks is not necessary, just your obedience.”

Celegorm snorted, shaking his head. Then, all mockery aside, he said: “It is fortunate you thought to order the outlying farms and settlements south and not have them join us in that trap.”

Curufin was silent. There could be no conceit in the face of the further disaster they had only avoided by Curufin’s quick-thinking. They had lost enough souls trapped in the Pass. The thought of _all_ their people being condemned to this horrific exile was unthinkable

“How will we convince Finrod to give us sanctuary,” Celegorm pointed out the obvious flaw in his brother’s plan. “I would rather not throw ourselves upon the altar of his altruism.”

Curufin’s face twisted at the mere thought. “No, never that. But if the North has fallen, then Finrod will be hard pressed soon and we can offer him something in exchange for asylum: veteran warriors. Indeed, Finrod should be grateful to receive such unlooked-for assistance, especially since we cannot expect his army to be much of anything. They will be untried and undisciplined, too used to eating well and the soft comforts of peace.”

Celegorm made a non-committal humming noise. He honestly didn’t know what he expected of Finrod –other than a cold shoulder hidden behind a manufactured smile. He pictured Finrod in Tirion, wearing the loose robes so favored among the Teleri, with bells threaded through his pale-yellow hair, and Indis’ blue eyes. Celegorm hadn’t liked Finrod in Valinor. 

But he could see in his brother’s face that Curufin’s mind had been made up, and Celegorm would follow. He would always follow, and one day, his brother would come back. Curufin was still in there, buried deep, under the layers of Fëanor’s ambitions and contempts Curufin had inflated beyond recognition. Their father had never wanted any of them to become him, or sacrifice everything that made them them, especially not to fulfill an Oath their father bitterly regretted. Celegorm _knew_ their father regretted it. Not all had been grief-madness those last months, sometimes their father would return to them, hold them, be held in return. And beg for their forgiveness.

Celebrimbor rode up the column of their people. He had a smudge of dirt on his cheekbone, and his dark hair was unraveling from its braids. His cloak was torn from brambles and thorn pits they’d been forced to chop through, and his hardy clothing was stained with black spider blood. 

Celegorm’s mind shied away from the memory of that terror. (Again and again they came, night after night, giving them no respite and their exhausted bodies no rest from the war that dogged them even now, after losing more than they thought they could bear. The children woke screaming from nightmares of a million eyes watching them from the black shadows. He dreamed of the night Finwë died, and felt the touch of Ungoliath’s filth on his skin like a greasy oil he couldn’t wash clean.)

Celebrimbor offered him a strained half-smile half-grimace, as if he couldn’t get his mouth to work properly. “We should turn north soon, and make for Tol Sirion. Minas Tirith is only two days ride. We could find refuge with Orodreth there.”

“We go south,” Curufin said, reaching over to pluck a patch of muddy leaves out of his son’s hair with a frown. “You should have bathed when we forded the Sirion.”

Celebrimbor’s mouth compressed, but didn’t offer a verbal defense. Ignoring his father’s criticism of his appearance, he asked: “South, why south? Those are Finrod’s lands, and I doubt very much that we shall receive his blessing to enter them.”

Curufin dismissed his son’s concern, “Finrod likes feeling morally superior too much to turn his ‘poor, homeless’ cousins away.”

Celebrimbor chose the easier path and offered his father’s words no challenge, but Celegorm saw a hundred suppressed words flashing behind his eyes. A fight would solve nothing though, and Celegorm could count on Celebrimbor to keep his protest locked behind his teeth. The last thing they needed was strife between father and son.

An hour later their scouts returned with word of a small war party riding south from Tol Sirion. If Celegorm had not become so suspicious of good fortune, he might have smiled when they intercepted the company of Elves and discovered the very Elf they wished to court the favor of at its head. He might have whispered a prayer of thanks to fate that they’d caught Finrod in an exceptionally generous mood (apparently he’d just had a close call with Orcs but was saved by some of the Edain of Dorthonion) which had Finrod smiling at the sight of cousins he’d cursed the names of when they’d met again with the unforgiving memory of the Helcaraxë lying between them like a bared blade. 

Finrod smiled and offered them haven in Nargothrond freely, while Curufin didn’t unbend his spine an inch and his face stared back at Finrod as pale and distant as a star. Finrod did not seemed to notice, or maybe he made a conscious decision _not_ to notice, and focus his welcoming glances and expressions of thankfulness for their promised aid at Celebrimbor who smiled reservedly back, determined to make up for his father’s chilly arrogance and his uncle’s negligent gratitude. 

Celegorm lost interest in Finrod after the promise of shelter was given. He’d watched Finrod’s expressions closely until he judged he had Finrod’s measure, then wrote him off as a none-threat. He was even a bit disappointed Finrod had grown into someone so closely resembling Finarfin’s practiced civility. 

He would have been content with this assessment of Finrod (one he’d made in all of five minutes), if he hadn’t felt the tension building in Curufin as Celebrimbor and Finrod continued to talk amicably. Or rather, Finrod talked and Celebrimbor nodded along while his whole body screamed discomfort at being honor-bond (as Celebrimbor saw it) to stumble through superficial conversation with a near-stranger.

Celegorm turned to look at Curufin who rode at his elbow. Huan loped along at Celegorm’s other side, Finrod and Celebrimbor having pulled ahead. Curufin’s face revealed nothing, and that in itself was a sign of how tightly he was keeping hold of his emotions. His hair flew after him like chains of obsidian, and his sharp, predatory face stared at Finrod’s back.

Finrod’s overlooking of Curufin’s snub _bothered_ Curufin. Curufin wasn’t in the practice of letting people-not-blood of Fëanor wield influence over him, so this reaction confused Celegorm, and worried him. Then he saw the slight angling of Finrod’s body in his saddle, the way he was very carefully _not_ keeping his face in profile for Curufin. So, Finrod was more aware than Celegorm had given him credit for. Perhaps he ever realized what ignoring Curufin was doing to a man like Curufin who _would not be dismissed_. 

But no, Celegorm decided, Finrod was not that clever. Though it seemed their stay in Nargothrond wouldn’t be quite as dull as he’d presumed. He’d have to keep an eye on Finrod; it was his duty to protect Curufin, and that included protecting him from himself.

*

Nargothrond rose from the rocky hillside as mighty as if it had grown from the bones of the earth. 

It was a seat of strength. Its great doors forged on the anvils of Khazâd Mastersmiths, its position easily defensible with the river gorge at its mouth and nothing but a single path leading up the steep hill’s side to its sole entrance. The danger of being trapped there, caught like rabbits in a hole, was one Curufin did not lightly throw aside. If the fall of his own seemingly impregnable fortress had taught him anything, it was that no-where was beyond Morgoth’s reach. 

He thought of the staggering arrogance the Noldor had indulged themselves in these last four-hundred years. They had been sloppy. They had believed themselves safe behind their high walls. They had thought they had caged Morgoth. They had not been so brash as to think Morgoth defeated, but certainly managed. 

Oh, there had been battles (skirmishes compared to the aftermath of Dagor Bragollach). There had been casualties, a steady trickle that wore down the soul. There had been patrols and more council meetings spent discussing the siege for anyone in the North to forget. Their watch upon the gates of Angband had never been neglected, but their pursuit of vengeance had been placed aside, like a dish served out of turn at a feast. When Curufin had spoken of pressing a more aggressive strike against the Enemy to lords outside his father’s people, he was labeled a warmonger.

Curufin the Belligerent 

Curufin the Mad 

But none dared name him Curufin the Fool.

Swift, he had argued, should be our vengeance! But they built thick walls, put down their swords and took up plows. And with time his mind too had turned to rule, and he forgot the urgency that had once driven him (that had driven his father –to his death). 

But his dreams had never forgotten, and while all the world seemed to move on, move forward, he could not. He was trapped in torment, a torment of fragments and riddles, the flashes of horrific battles. He dreamt red hair splayed upon a battlefield with the sound of the sea in his ears. He dreamt a green so deep it put the ocean to shame staring like two pieces of empty glass, unblinking, as someone screamed like nothing human. He dreamed his son’s hands, rings of gold, and the slice of betrayal sharper than any sword thrust as a sly mouth curved into a cruel smile. He dreamed Fëanor’s mouth, lips bitten and teeth stained red like a bruise, pulled back in a snarl of defiance, and with the flash of his teeth he ate all Curufin’s doubts. 

He had dreamed the Dragons before he’d had a name for the slide of scales, the press of heat greater than any forge-fire upon his nape, and the smell of death. He had dreamed them, but had not _understood_. What was foresight, than, but a curse? He had dreamed a thousand fears, a hundred fleeting joys, dozens of deaths, and for all that, for years and years of dreams piled up like a tower of corpses in his mind, he had saved nothing and no one in the end.

They had approached Nargothrond from the north, and forded the River Ringil only a few miles upstream, now the cluster of stony hills that housed Nargothrond’s cave system rose before them. Curufinwë dismounted before him, tossing his reigns to one of the waiting stable-hands who would lead the horse to a swelling paddock. The sun was a glaring ball of spite in the sky, pressing hot and heavy against exposed skin, turning armor into bakeries about trapped bodies, and exasperating the already overwhelming stench of unwashed bodies and the blood of his wounded and battered people. 

Curufin had shaken Celegorm off. His brother had been sticking to his side like a bur. Curufin was torn between annoyance and secret satisfaction. Celegorm was worried for him. Curufin had known for days why. It wasn’t hard for him to discern why he’d fallen into a snappish mood and his eyes kept drifting towards Finrod when the only things on his mind should have been his people’s well-being and the completion of his father’s Oath.

Finrod had already surrendered his horse and was now assisting Celegorm in arranging wagons to carry their wounded to the gates. Celegorm caught Curufin’s eye and twitched his brow, Curufin smirked back in answer. Celegorm was _not pleased_ with Finrod’s ‘assistance.’ He could manage his own people, thank you very much.

Curufin stalked over and made sure to stop a few inches too-close to Finrod’s elbow. Finrod concealed his startelement well when he turned to find Curufin’s intense gaze fixed upon him. 

“My brother has things in hand, _my king_ ,” he mocked subtly, curious to see if Finrod would pick up on it. It was a game after all, and it was time to start feeling out the opposition.

Finrod’s eyes narrowed. Good. Finrod was not a complete fool. “Very well, _cousin_ , I shall show you to the guest rooms, if that would please you?” Who would have thought Finarfin’s pretty, perfect son would grow up to have some bite?

Curufin smiled, teeth white and sharp in the sunlight, “If you would be so kind, my king.”

Finrod twitched, “Finrod will do Curufin.”

Curufin offered a shallow bow. “As you wish…Finrod,” he made his voice stumble over the name, face shifting itself into a doubtful expression, as if unsure at the familiarity. “I would not dream of making you uncomfortable in your own home after you have been so generous to open your doors to us.” He finished the earnest performance with just the right touch of sullenness for injured pride.

Finrod frowned. “It is nothing I would not have done for any ally…any family.”

Curufin bit the temptation to ask if Finrod would have done so much for Fëanor. That would have been a misstep. He inclined his head, “Still, it is no small thing you have done for us. It shall not be forgotten.”

“Well,” Finrod seemed to fumble for an appropriate response with Curufin staring at him. “As I said, I will show you the guest rooms when Celegorm and Celebrimbor are ready.”

“No need to wait,” Curufin waved off the concern. “They will not wish to leave until all the wounded have been tended to.” 

“Very well, this way,” Finrod agreed stiffly and strode off for his city’s doors.

Curufin wondered if Finrod thought him a poor lord to not have the same concerns. He’d have to arrange for Finrod to catch him in a moment of deep disquiet over the needs of some of his people. Perhaps he would even make it a true need and not all a lie, half-truths were always the easier to buy after all. And since his people were used to their lord’s legitimate interest in their welfare, it would not require him to let his chosen recipient into his artifice. 

The idea of Finrod seeing him in a moment of genuine emotion for his people was absurd. He’d never give such a weapon into the hands of his opponent. Truth was always a weakness in your enemy’s hands.

Finrod had sent word ahead of their coming, so Curufin was not surprised to find the rooms already aired-out and fit for habitation. There was a surprising amount of light for a cave. Curufin supposed Nargothrond was impressive. It was beautiful to be sure, but he looked at the murals covering every inch of the cavern walls, the rivers of light dancing upon the polished stones and glinting in be-jeweled statues, and thought of the fortress he’d built upon a cliff top. He thought of the thickness of the High Wall, the sheerness of the Pass’s slopes, the craftiness of his engineering. He thought of company after company of his father’s people headed North to besieged Angband, sending other soldiers home in their place as they took their turn living in the shadow of Thangorodrim. He thought of his people’s worn clothing, the comforts they left behind in exchange for swords and children clinging to their necks. He thought of hungry days and terrors in the night.

He wandered over to touch the rich velvet hanging of the bed and sneered. He had his back to Finrod though, so Finrod did not see his scorn.

“I trust it meets your approval.”

Curufin turned at the pinch in the words. Was that a touch of defensiveness? He studied Finrod’s face, looking for clues, for weaknesses, for new pieces in the game. But Finrod was proving to be a skilled opponent and his face was nothing but a calm (empty) mask.

“Nargothrond is very beautiful.” Finrod frowned at the praise, eyes narrowing as if looking for traps. Curufin just raised a brow at the assessing gaze. 

Finrod looked away first, unsatisfied. “Well then, I will leave you. I customarily take the evening meal in my private chambers, but I will have the Great Hall made available. A feast, of course, shall be prepared for tomorrow night.” 

“You honor us,” Curufin swallowed the sardonic tone wanting to slip out with the words. 

Finrod moved towards the door, “If there is nothing else you need?”

Curufin wanted to grin with teeth, but did not, knowing such an expression would immediately alert Finrod towards suspicion. He had played his cards to maneuver Finrod into a room, alone, with him. He had passed off the duties as lord he held in importance just below his son and brothers, his father’s memory, and the Oath especially so he could play out this moment with Finrod.

“No, you can go,” he seemingly dismissed Finrod and reached up to unclasp his stained cloak. He let out a hiss of pain and twisted his face into a grimace for Finrod’s benefit. His hand jerked (as if against his will) toward his side, before composing himself. He straightened up and shot Finrod a proud, stoic look.

Finrod allowed himself to be played beautifully. He stepped forward, “You are injured.”

“It is nothing,” Curufin waved him away. “Leave it.”

Finrod did not play the script precisely as Curufin had imagined it though. He raised a cool brow, “You forget, I had three younger siblings, and have fostered many more stubborn sons of Bëor. Now go sit on the bed. I will call a healer.”

Even though Finrod did not act as Curufin had anticipated, it was close enough. He sat as ordered, making sure to watch Finrod’s face to see if he took enjoyment from Curufin’s obedience. There was nothing. 

Curufin pondered and plotted as Finrod left to send word for a healer. He touched his side, feeling the very real wound there wrapped by Celegorm just last night. While he would have preferred to conceal his injury from Finrod, sacrifices had to be made. Though the expressions of pain had been a little too close to the truth (a truth he’d been too proud to admit before then). He was thankful the journey was over and he wouldn’t have to climb onto his horse with Celegorm’s subtle assistance another morning.

Finrod returned, which made Curufin sit straighter on the bed though it caused his side to burn. Finrod, surprisingly, didn’t pester him to see the wound, or ask how he’d become injured. Curufin had thought he had Finrod son of Finarfin unraveled down to the tinniest knots. It was a blow to his pride that he misjudged such a key player in the game (Fëanor would not have).

Curufin watched Finrod from beneath the dark fan of his lashes as they awaited the healer. Finrod sat confidently in his chair, his back a fine, straight line Curufin allowed his eyes to linger on a moment before sweeping on. Finrod’s hair lay about his shoulders in loose waves, with only a few strategic braids placed to keep the weight off his face. 

Finrod had worn Noldorin braids when last Curufin had seen him. What did this change signify? Finrod wasn’t the only Noldor he’d observed in Nargothrond walking about with unbound hair. It would have been considered indecent in Tirion. Frankly, Curufin thought it impractical. It was no wonder Finrod had almost gotten himself killed if he was going into battle with his hair flinging about for anyone to snag. The fact Nargothrond’s Noldor had abandoned the practice of braiding was just another clue to the idle, indulgent lives they’d been leading. 

He ran his eyes down Finrod’s thighs, the curve of a calf, over elegant, tapered fingers, and settled on the column of Finrod’s throat. Finrod had loosed his tunic in the heat of ridding, and it now flapped open to reveal a hint of a pale collarbone. 

By the time the healer bustled into the room, Curufin was ready for the next round.

The healer put her sack on the bed and began pulling out ointments and gauze as she ordered him sharply to disrobe. If Curufin were not in the middle of a game, he would have cut the healer with his tongue for her impertinence.

Finrod rose like a regal lion unfolding from its throne and tried to make his excuses. Curufin would not allow Finrod to leave until he’d achieved his goal. Pretending to swallow his pride, he admitted: “I require assistance with my armor.”

Finrod responded to the stiffness in his voice as he would not have to a humble ‘please.’ Finrod had proved, after all, that he was not a dullard. Curufin lifted his arms to give Finrod access to the buckles running down the armor’s sides. He made sure to clench his jaw and breathe heavily through his nose, not trying to conceal the pain the action caused him. Finrod’s eyes flicker up to his face and triumph swelled Curufin’s lungs at the softening of that mouth.

Curufin enjoyed how close Finrod stood as he worked the buckles, and then slid the armor from Curufin’s chest and back. He savored the forced proximity, the way Finrod’s knuckles brushed against his spine, the way Finrod gathered the wealth of Curufin’s hair in his hands and lifted it for Curufin to hold, the way Finrod had to face him to unlace his tunic (close enough to kiss). 

Finrod was not allowed to look at anything but Curufin now.

Curufin tilted his neck when Finrod’s fingers crawled towards the tunic’s laces, making sure to angle it so the sunlight would grace the column’s planes. He pretended to lose his balance (just a slight tipping) as Finrod pulled the tunic free, so that he might grasp hold of Finrod’s forearm, leaning close enough to brush his chest against Finrod’s. He tracked Finrod with his eyes, his face closed but staring, making sure Finrod took note of his riveted gaze.

And yet, though he should have sown the seeds of a subtle seduction, Finrod (but for giving him strange looks) appeared not to notice! Freed of the tunic, Finrod moved away to allow the healer access to Curufin’s wounds, for all appearances as if nothing of note had passed between them. 

Curufin clutched his fists, nails digging into skin, allowing himself the physical sign of his frustration as it would be passed off as pain from the healer’s prodding. He forced down the rage he wanted to fling about like knifes at anyone close enough to hurt. This was too important to fail. His people were counting on him to provide for their well-fare, five of his brothers were being savaged by the enemy, and his father’s last wish was unfulfilled.

Curufin had to have patience. A tree was not grown in a day. He must consider the fact that he had never tried his hand at seduction before. But he had to use every weapon in his hands now he was homeless and powerless as he had not been since Fëanor’s body burned in his arms. 

He would seduce Finrod and secure Nargothrond. He had no desire for Nargothrond himself –no interest in ruling its soft-handed populace—but its wealth, its armies, yes, those he wanted. Those he _needed_. Father needed them, needed Curufin to not fail him again. Curufin couldn’t fail. He had to get the Silmarils back. Father had entrusted this task to them with his dying breath, he was counting on them to fulfill the Oath, to unmake the pain, erase the mistakes, rewind the grief until it pulled its black claws back out of Father’s chest. When Curufin had the Silmarils back everything could be as it once was. The Oath would be broken, Father did not have to bear that burden anymore, and the Silmarils would call Father’s spirit home from the darkness and in their Light Father would be reborn. 

Curufin had to get the Silmarils back. He couldn’t fail. If he failed they would never be free. If he failed Father would be lost forever in the darkness. If he failed the light in eyes of green so deep it put the oceans to shame would go out. If he failed his son’s fingers ringed in gold, his clever, gifted hands, would be taken apart piece by piece in the dark as Curufinwë screamed and begged for his father to save him.


	62. Chapter 50

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 50

The half-eaten tray was pushed aside, swept out of the way in favor of the large map of Beleriand that lay spread and marked like a child’s harshly graded essay with lines of red, circles of yellow, and dots of black ink. Upon the forgotten tray sat a bowl of caramels. Brown fingers crawled sneakily towards the bowl. Finrod swatted his son’s devious hand with the missive he’d been frowning over.

Gildor snatched his hand back and flashed his father an innocent smile.

“Do not look at me like that,” Finrod snapped the scroll open again. “You know you are not allowed sweets this close to bedtime.”

Gildor crossed his arms and pouted. “I am _eleven_ , Father. Nobody else my age aren’t allowed deserts; it’s not fair!”

Finrod sighed, setting the scroll aside. Gildor was upset Finrod had brought his duties as king into their time together. With the war in the North, Gelmir and Gwindor’s absence, and Rístang drifting away, Gildor was left alone too often. 

By ‘nobody’ Gildor meant Rístang who was Sinda and grew swifter than Gildor who carried an echo of the Tree Light in his _fëa_ through Finrod. Rístang had long outstripped Gildor in physical maturity as well as intellectual pursuits, and outgrown their friendship. 

It was a hard thing to lose a childhood friend, especially when you were still the child, the one left behind while the other explored the wider world of adulthood. The change could not have come at a worse time. Gelmir, who’d been a mentor to Gildor, and Gwindor, who Gildor adored, had been sent North to Tol Sirion with a large portion of Nargothrond’s army. Finrod needed them there. He must put the needs of his people before those of his child. 

But while he understood the source of Gildor’s discontent, he could not afford to indulge it as Gildor’s father: “Stop pouting,” he said sternly. “You know why you cannot have sweets this late. We are not going to discuss it.” 

Gildor folded his arms over his chest, but thankfully did not talk back. He may chafe under the regulation, but he knew the reasons behind it, as Finrod was not one to set boundaries without explanations. It was hard to be different, Finrod could sympathize with that, but Gildor just didn’t react to sugar like other children. Even a hint of sugar would have the boy flying off the walls into the midnight hour. Even now without the sugar, seated upon the table next to Finrod, Gildor’s legs kicked out in a steady, sporadic rhythm, and his hands wandered into this and that mischief every few minutes. 

Finrod had had to learn much by experience while raising his son. Experience told him Gildor needed a task to occupy those restless hands. “Gildor, will you fetch me the letters from Uncle Fingolfin on my desk? The ones with the red ribbon.”

Gildor, despite being a little petulant tonight over Finrod using up all his Gildor Time on duties, still hoped down right away, excited to be helping his father with such an important thing as the war. He returned with the letters and perched himself right back up at Finrod’s elbow, proudly displaying the bundle to his father.

Finrod smiled, taking the letters, “Thank you, sweetheart. That was quick of you. Maybe I should hire you as my scribe and spare poor Idhion the trouble of trying to keep up.” Gildor’s whole face brightened at the praise.

When Finrod turned away to flip through Fingolfin’s letters, he watched out of the corner of his eye as Gildor leaned forward to study the war map. Those restless hands traced the red lines of the Enemy’s troop movements. Finrod shied away from the redness blanketing Dorthonion. The fingers lingered over the many black dots signifying regiments of Elves clustered around Tol Sirion and the tower of Minas Tirith where Orodreth held the valley and so many of Finrod’s soldiers had been sent, including Gelmir and Gwindor.

Finrod looked back at the recent missive he’d set aside, feeling the words burned into his fingertips where they’d traced the request. Guilin wanted to join his sons on the front lines, and his wife Bainar, unlike a traditional Noldo woman who would have been taken up the charge of managing her husband’s lands and people in his absence, was determined to go with him. 

Guilin’s words were crouched in a request, but the missive was only a formality, a courtesy for the king whose rule they respected but had sworn no loyalty too despite their own son being one of Finrod’s sworn-companions. Guilin was the grandson of the High King and answered to no other. A fact Finrod took no issue with, except for now when he dearly wished he had the power to deny Guilin and Bainar. But they had the right to fight beside their sons. It was not Finrod’s place to try and protect them from horrors and dangers they had already faced in the past. Neither of them were unbloodied warriors after all.

The instinct to protect rode strong under Finrod’s ribs when he looked at those curious fingers walking over lives in grave danger, and legions of monsters just waiting to plague Gildor’s dreams (or tear his son’s body to pieces just after they’d crushed his heart, but Finrod would not think of that lest he be crippled by fear).

The sound of the door opening –without awaiting an invitation—sent two pairs of identical eyes shooting up, one narrowed in anticipation of the one who entered so boldly (he already guessed by the boldness, the _arrogance_ of the presumption), the other pair wide and curious. 

Curufin pulled up short, caught for a moment in the sets of eyes, both blue enough to challenge the sky and tapered elegantly at the corners. But the startelement lasted only the moment of a breath, before Curufin glided in again as if he’d been born in this room. 

Gildor’s head cocked as he watched Curufin enter the room like a jungle panther. Gildor and Curufin had never been in close quarters since the sons of Fëanor had taken refuge in Nargothrond a bare month ago. Finrod had made sure of it.

As Finrod met Curufin’s gaze, he slipped a mask of calm politeness over his face and felt the surge of resentment he always did at Curufin for making him play these games. He hated masks. But his usual openhandedness and candor would only be taken advantage of by Curufin. Finrod had met enough people like Curufin to learn how to sidestep their webs and prune back the thicket of their rapacious ambitions with a courteous façade. But the act of wearing masks rankled, and there was something about Curufin’s slick smiles that urged Finrod to wield his tongue at the Fëanorion like a throwing knife. 

That something wasn’t hard to guess. Curufin had Fëanor’s hair –that exact shade of black, so thick and straight it reflected the light like polished obsidian. He had his eyes –not the exact shade, no—but they carried the same haughtiness. He had his smile –and this Finrod loathed the most—the way it could curl up in scornful mockery but still look obscenely beautiful in the act.

Curufin had the power to summon the shade of Fëanor into the room and reduce Finrod (inwardly, never let him see) to the insecure child only Fëanor’s dismissive glance had ever provoked in him. Fëanor had made him feel like inferior craftsmanship. Fëanor had not bothered to hate Finrod; he’d ensured Finrod knew he wasn’t worth the effort for no other reason than the name of Finrod’s grandmother.

Fëanor had this way of looking at you, right through you, as if you were nothing. Curufin was only a shadow of Fëanor –his face, the twisting of a contemptuous mouth—but it was enough to make Finrod resentful of his presence.

The strangest part of it all was that Curufin was rarely aiming these expressions of distain at _Finrod_. Only on occasion, as if with a laps of thought, before the expression was gone again and replaced with an odd, almost pleasantness. Except there was nothing benevolent in Curufin’s eyes which made the smiles he sometimes favored Finrod with all the more unnatural.

The abundance of Curufin’s presence was another annoyance. It seemed whenever he turned around Curufin was there at his elbow: in council meetings, at meals, in the library, visiting him in his study at all hours, and ‘happening’ upon each other in the corridors. Curufin was fixated on Finrod. It was disturbing, but not shocking. Curufin was ruled by sly ambitions, and as the king, it should come as no surprise Curufin’s attention should settled upon Finrod above all others. Curufin was one of those souls who followed shifting power like the ocean’s tide, and rolled his dice in the soulless-sport that was politics.

All the more reason to keep him away from Gildor. And yet Finrod could not forbid Curufin from speaking to Gildor without crossing into inexcusable rudeness. Which was why Finrod found himself holding his tongue as Curufin slinked towards them, staring at Finrod in that way he had: with intensity bordering on the alarming.

“I hope I find you well this evening, Finrod?” The question was poised in thoughtfulness, but Finrod was not fooled into thinking Curufin actually cared about his well-being except to the extent that it benefited Curufin.

“Well enough, and yourself?” Finrod bit back the urge to demand what Curufin wanted and cease with all these games cloaked in more games. Curufin was exhausting. 

“Concerned, I believe, would be a more apt word.” And for a flashing of a moment Finrod was pulled into the act and actually believed Curufin was weighed down by troubles, so good a liar as he was. 

But then Finrod pulled himself free of Curufin’s thorn thicket and asked, in an unremarkable tone: “What concerns do you speak of? Is there some want of your people’s Nargothrond has not met?”

“Oh no, you have been a most gracious host,” Curufin slid him one of those strange smiles that seemed to be teetering on a sneer. “My people want for nothing. No, it is the war that troubles me. Or rather, Celegorm and my lack of knowledge of it.” The suspicion in Curufin’s mind was too thick to entirely conceal, and Finrod read him, clearly, just this once: Curufin was paranoid to the point of affliction.

“I thought you would prefer a rest from such distressing thoughts for a time. Your people have lost their home. They have been forced to wander and face great hardships. I sought not to conceal from you. After all, do your people not now make up a bulk of Nargothrond’s defense? To cut their lords out from such councils would be folly,” Finrod reasoned placidly, without revealing his amusement that he had unknowingly caused Curufin such anxiety at his own game.

The amusement was fleeting, and stolen the moment Finrod’s greatest weakness jumped into the conversation, boldly insinuating himself in the adult’s talk. “Is it true you fought a Dragon?”

The slow turn of a head, as if Curufin was reluctant to let Finrod loose from his hook, and then those eyes –their shape too reminiscent of a pair that challenged the Morning Star—were fixed on Gildor. Gildor did not squirm under the gaze, but rather unfolded himself from his lazy, swinging-foot crumple upon the table to stare right back at Curufin with eyes all the brighter for Curufin’s attention.

Curufin smiled, sly as a fox, and slipped into an easy stride towards a pair of chairs and couch by the unlit Khazâd room-heater. The room, like all others in Nargothrond, possessed no fireplace, but all the lamps sizzled in their beakers and bathed the room in a warm, shadowed glow. 

There was dust in Curufin’s hair, Finrod noted whimsically as he watched him settled upon the chair like a throne. It glinted gold against the black.

In that one move Curufin had re-written the power lines of this exchange, and Gildor, oblivious, trailed right after him, eager to hear an answer to his question. Gildor made to sit on the couch, but Curufin motioned him to the floor at his knee. Finrod’s nostrils flared as his son settled on the rug before Curufin like a servant awaiting his master’s signal.

Gildor’s eyes were wide and admiring as he looked up at Curufin, and it was not hard to see why even though it galled Finrod to admit it. Curufin sat as carelessly elegant as if he owned the world. His black-booted ankles were crossed neatly before him, with one slim hand dangling off the armrest like the white wing of a bird. A single ring adorned that hand’s pointer finger in the shape of a silver star with a square onyx gem at its center. 

No other adornment save his belt about his waist, with a knife upon it, could Finrod find, which struck him as extremely odd. He remembered Curufin in Tirion, the way his hair and fingers used to be saturated in jewels on feast days. Yet somehow it had never been a gaudy display, because Curufin had always known just how to place the gems and which pieces would complement the others.

Unfortunately Curufin didn’t require jewels too appear the most sophisticated being in any room. And Gildor was of an age to notice these things, and be impressed by dapper men come out of the fabled North with whispers of grand (and not so grand) deeds trailing in their wake. Finrod watched his son attempt subtlety as Gildor arranged his own fingers to fall with that same careless elegance as Curufin’s. More disturbing still was the way Gildor tried to copy the cool expression on Curufin’s face.

“Battle is too generous a word for it. Nearly burned alive would be more appropriate,” Finrod’s words tumbled harsh as slaps from his mouth. Curufin shot him a surprised look at the uncharacteristic callousness, before it turned calculating and whatever guilt beginning to grow in Finrod’s chest strangled. 

“You are mistaken, my king,” Curufin slipped back into a formal address which he knew Finrod detested for the mockery he just _knew_ was hiding under it. “Myself –indeed many of my finest warriors—held the great Fire-drakes of Morgoth off for _months_.” Injured pride in the snap of the words, and Finrod hated Curufin for making him wonder if there was a hidden message there, one hinting at another pair of brothers who had been killed with the first assault. Would Curufin dare mock their deaths? But then this was the same man who had done as much when he’d made light of Fingolfin’s people’s horror upon the Helcaraxë at the Feast of Mereth Aderthad.

“What was it like?” Gildor begged for a story, face shinning with enthusiasm, not connecting the dots between Curufin’s words and the dead uncles he had never met.

Curufin looked down at the child kneeling at his feet, and Finrod wished Curufin’s face was not half so beautiful and empty. Finrod’s hand clenched about forgotten letters in his hands. He knew he had done too much to ensure Gildor was sheltered. He’d not wanted these horrors to touch something so precious, but without Gwindor or Gelmir at hand, Gildor was left vulnerable to an man who would step-in and fill that empty place of ‘older, rakish cousin’ Gwindor once held.

“I think that is a story for another night,” Finrod dismissed, feigning indifference to the scene spiraling out of his control.

Gildor shot him a petulant look, frustrated by what he saw as his father’s constant inability to see him as the ‘grown-up’ he so desperately wanted to be. Gildor did not talk-back however. He had not quite reached that rebellious stage Finrod had witnessed in so many of his fosterlings when they challenged adults’ every word and snapped at the bit of their youth for more head like young colts. 

“Yes, perhaps another day,” Curufin surprisingly agreed. 

Both Finrod and Gildor looked back at him (the center of attention yet again). Curufin was watching Gildor, his eyes lidded with casual appraisal as if waiting for Gildor to prove his interest. The attention dashed a flush along Gildor’s cheekbones as he straightened his back and stared bravely back, wanting to impress and gain that seemingly elusive approval. Gildor was not the kind of child who measured his worth against others, but he did so relish attention, especially the attention of older, impressive men such as Curufin.

Gildor seemed to pass a secret test, because Curufin steepled his fingers in a move of cultured perfection, and lent forward on his elbows. “Curiosity is a good thing. One destined for greatness will always be looking to correct their ignorance.” 

Gildor rewarded Curufin’s restrained praise with a dimpled smile. “I am going to fight in the war when I am old enough,” Gildor shared like a holy truth. “I will be a hero like Gwindor, my cousin. He is the greatest warrior in Nargothrond!”

Curufin raised a cool brow, “Is that so? You must be very dedicated to your training to achieve such a selfless ambition.”

Gildor squirmed, “Well…Gwindor used to teach me, when he visited, and I have gotten lessons from other soldiers when they have time….” He trailed off, wilting under Curufin’s critical look.

Curufin turned a cutting, judgmental look at Finrod. “You have not trained your son in the sword?” 

Finrod refused to be ashamed. No, he’d not allowed Gildor formal lessons. No, he’d not taught his son how to kill before how to show compassion. It was Curufin who had the backwards thinking; it was this hard land that had forced so many other children to do just that. But before Morgoth had slammed down their siege, brushing them aside like so many toy soldiers, it hadn’t seemed necessary for Gildor to learn to fight so young. Maybe in another decade or two Finrod would have allowed it…but now? Now how could he justify leaving Gildor untutored and vulnerable?

“He shall be formally trained soon enough,” he said stiffly. 

Gildor’s face lit up like a sunrise at the promise of his dearest wish’s fulfillment. “Really, Father? Oh please say yes!” He bounced on his heels, looking so much like an eager puppy Finrod let his face soften into an adoring smile even if he’d not wished to ever drop his masks before Curufin. Some things were more important than Curufin’s games.

“Yes, I promise.” Gildor cheered and was upon Finrod in a flash, skinny arms wrapped about Finrod’s neck and his cloud of hair flying into Finrod’s mouth. Finrod slipped his arms around his vibrating son, closed his eyes, breathing in Gildor’s sweet, soft scent, and pretended they were the only two souls in the room.

Curufin did not allow the illusion to stand. “I could teach the boy,” came the shocking and disturbing offer from across the room. “I taught my own son the sword, and others besides. He should have none but the best as a king’s son.”

Gildor’s head whipped around to stare wide-eyed at Curufin. “Really? You could be my teacher?” And then, head spinning around again to Finrod with big, pleading eyes, “Father plea—”

“No.” The word slipped out sharp with denial and repugnance. Gildor flinched, smiling mouth crumpling. Finrod blamed Curufin. The smug blackguard was watching them with heavy, crafty eyes. How Finrod loathed him!

“It is your father’s decision, of course,” Curufin painted him the villain as Gildor slipped limp with dejection from his arms. “I thought only to offer my skills –as kin.” 

“I will have Gwindor teach you, when he returns,” Finrod said, refusing to let Curufin steal _anything_ from him. The prospect of his hero teaching him was everything Gildor could have dreamed, and set him off in another flurry of hugs and shouted thanks.

Finrod had hoped this would be the strike that broke whatever glamour Curufin held for his son, but it was not so. As soon as Gildor was sure his father was left in no doubt of his elation and gratitude, he went right back to Curufin and took up his place at his feet, mouth sprouting a multitude of questions about the North, swords, the High King, Curufin’s own adventures, and everything else in-between. Curufin did turn aside from more gruesome information, but what he offered was enough to have Gildor eating out of the palm of his hand.

Curufin kept his responses tame, but Finrod thought more than one comment squatted in superiority. Finrod pretended to lose interest in the rather one-sided interrogation, and picked up Fingolfin’s letters, but did not see a word of them. He debated with himself about intervening and sending Gildor to an early bed, but in the end he decided to do nothing. If Curufin was genuinely interested in Gildor for some scheme or other (no doubt something to do with Finrod), then he would find a way to meet Gildor again –away from Finrod’s listening ears. Finrod preferred to monitor Curufin’s influence while he could. 

He nearly lost the fight with his feigned inattention though when Curufin _touched his son_. He saw the gesture out of the corner of his eye, and his head snapped up to witness the fullness of the deed. And yet, it was not a crime, or even a breach of etiquette for Curufin’s hand to reposition Gildor’s arm as the child took an imaginary swing of a sword, showing off what he’d already learned. Curufin was kin and thus allowed to touch Gildor according to every custom of the Noldor. 

Finrod forced himself to remain seated and keep hold of his composure. Curufin had done nothing wrong. No, he’d even been exceptionally patient and almost…friendly with Gildor. Curufin had an agenda, Finrod knew, but he did not know with surety that its achievement would hurt Gildor. But it wasn’t until Curufin touched Gildor again a while later that his initial fears uncoiled (a notch or two) in his stomach.

Gildor was begging for another story of Celegorm and his hound Huan, but Curufin was not budging. Curufin chuckled (for once not a calculated laugh) at Gildor’s antics, and said: “You are a young prince and it is good you do not shy from naming your desires. But I am an old prince and do not have to indulge them. And right now what I want right is peace from bratty boys haggling me with questions.”

Finrod stiffened, poised to intervene and save his precious son from such abuse, when Curufin’s fingers reached out and touched the shell of Gildor’s ear as if in an absent thought as a small, _sincere_ , smile drug at his lips. Gildor took the words as a tease, and beamed up at Curufin, leaning into the brief caress. But the moment Gildor turned into the hand it was withdrawn, and the fleeting smile dropped away with a frown.

“Off with you now,” Curufin ordered gruffly, eyes shifting away from Gildor’s glowing face at his feet. Finrod suddenly understood: for a moment Curufin had forgotten which little boy knelt at his knee and stared up at him with eager, attentive eyes. For the flashing of a long forgotten memory (forced into deep chasms of a mind lest they go mad), Curufin had been in Valinor again with his son.

Finrod wondered if that gesture of tracing just an ear in tenderness was one Curufin often bestowed on Celebrimbor when he was young. He supposed he would never know, for whatever softness had crept in had now frozen on the barren tundra of Curufin’s face. 

Finrod’s eyes shifted out of focus as the sound of Gildor’s protests and wheedling floated to his still half-listening ears. And he wondered. He wondered if Curufin might be more than just the hollow shell of ambitions he’d assumed. Had he judged too hastily? Had his eyes been blinded by prejudice? Had he now became one of those hypocrites who adorned his city, turning up their noses at everyone they considered beneath them?

“You really got to see the Dwarves’ home? Honestly? What was it like?” Gildor was asking Curufin in awe. Finrod had missed the beginning of this story as well as how his son had cajoled _Curufin_ into another one. But then, Gildor had always been a charmer.

“They prefer the name Khazâd,” Curufin shared, and Finrod was amazed to hear none of the usual contempt that seemed to be a permanent feature of Curufin’s speech.

“Kha-z-â-d,” Gildor tried the pronunciation, tongue stumbling. “Do you know any other Dwar—Khazâd words?”

“Khuzdul,” Curufin corrected, and then Finrod could not look away because a thousand flowers suddenly bloomed open on Curufin’s face. Curufin’s whole face was transformed, the distant, aloof features taking on an animation Finrod had not even presumed possible. “Indeed,” Curufin continued, leaning in like an eager child towards Gildor. “I alone, of all the Eldar, have learned Khuzdul. The Khazâd chose me above all others to gift with this greatest mark of their friendship and trust.”

Then he pulled out the knife he wore belted to his side, and Finrod saw that the blade was black and tapered into a razor’s edge so delicate, he thought surely it would snap before it severed even a twig from its limb. “This is Angrist, Iron-clever,” Curufin displayed the blade as if it were the High King’s golden crown. “Forged by Telchar, greatest of the Khazâd smith’s of Nogrod, and gifted to me as a mark of our eternal friendship. You will not find a more perfect blade among the Khazâd’s treasures or even in the hand of a Noldo.”

Gildor sucked in a gasp and reached out, fingers just hesitating long enough to receive Curufin’s nod of permission, before they skimmed along the black steel. “It is warm!” he cried, pulling his hand back.

“Yes,” Curufin’s eyes crinkled at the corners as Gildor’s fingers overcame their surprise and began the exploration anew. “It is Khazâd magic at its finest.”

“It’s like it’s alive!” 

Curufin smirked, “Well done. Yes, that would be an apt assumption.” He pulled the blade gently back from Gildor’s rapt quest and returned it to its sheaf.

Now Finrod could not restrain his own curiosity, and he abandoned his pretence of work to approach the enthroned Curufin. “I have heard Khuzdul is the most difficult language to master, even more so than Quenya.” And if his voice had a touch of appreciation in it for Curufin’s accomplishment, who could blame him?

Curufin turned to him, that intense gaze capturing Finrod and Finrod alone. “It was no easy thing, it is true.”

Finrod wished Curufin was more given to boasting, for now he was forced to surrender again to his curiosity. “You have been a guest at their halls? Few are the number of Elves so honored.” He did not name himself among them, though he had walked once under the golden ceiling of Nogrod’s mighty halls that seemed to rival the sky for magnificence, but only once. He would go again, if only he had the time. 

“Yes, I dwelt there for a time while I studied their tongue,” Curufin’s mouth softened in remembrance. 

Again, no more than the bare bones were shared when Finrod longed for a feast. “And? Surely you beheld great wonders in your time there.”

“Indeed, I did,” Curufin allowed, and when it seemed for a moment he would divulge no more, Finrod felt a cry of frustration bubble his throat. But then Curufin’s hesitation crumbled and that eager child Finrod had glimpsed before scooted out. Curufin’s hands –which had been folded fastidiously in his lap—leapt up to paint wonders in the air as he spoke, and his mouth brightened into a full, pleasing curve as teeth which so often appeared wolfish now shone like pearls in the lamp light.

Of the Khazâd’s secrets, Curufin shared none (as was right), but long did he speak of their great skill in metal and stone craft, the glory of their halls, and the tenacious, honorable, and stead-fast nature of the Firebeards of Nogrod. Finrod was mesmerized by the charisma in Curufin’s voice, the way his slim, pale hands danced in the air, and the passion lighting his very skin aglow. Here, in the most unlikely of places, Finrod had found what he missed most of his youth. Here he found a meeting of minds, a fashioning of views and arguments and visions of wonder. Here he found potential unlooked for. Potential for a tentative friendship, for a second chance, for a delicate extension of trust, for how could Curufin be nothing but a cold schemer now?

They talked long enough for Gildor’s head to pillow in Finrod’s lap and the candles to burn low. They talked long enough to forget what unfortunate events had brought them to this room, this moment. And when a nearby lamp hissed out its last gasp of oil and Gildor shifted with a soft sigh, Finrod found himself staring back at Curufin with the echo of a conversation well enjoyed still clinging to the air as they dropped into a comfortable silence.

Finrod looked away when the stare drew out too long and edged towards that intensity of intent that twisted in his chest and made his skin scratchy with discomfort. He rose, lifting Gildor’s lanky form in his arms. Curufin joined him on his feet and they parted at the door. Finrod felt the beginning of distance slinking back in between them, and even though Curufin had already lost that passionate energy that had given Finrod hope, Finrod was resolved to pursue his decision towards friendship. Or as close as one could get with Curufin. 

So when Curufin turned away from him at the door, Finrod said, “Good night, cousin,” and found the naming of kinship did not leave a queasy hole in his belly as it once might have.

Curufin’s step hesitated, and he slid a glance back over his shoulder at Finrod, one of the slender braids about his face falling into his eyes. Curufin nodded curtly in acknowledgment before walking off again, but Finrod supposed that was next to a smile for Curufin.


	63. Chapter 51

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: Dagor-Aglon: A name I created for the battle in the Pass of Aglon in 402.

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 51

There were many who considered Celegorm a vacuous cad, with no more brains than an average dog. Celegorm would joke that, measured against his brothers, he was lucky not to be ranked a squirrel-brain. In a family known for its remarkable minds, he considered himself fortunate there were any left to inherit. Others assumed he spent all his time carousing and throwing violent temper tantrums in important councils. He had a temper, he did not deny, but he’d been doing far more than losing it in those council meetings.

It had been Celegorm who organized the Fëanorions’ army into the compact, highly mobile units they’d adopted centuries ago and never strayed from. It had been Celegorm who marshaled that first assault when Arda was still frozen under starlight. It had been Celegorm who commanded their rear-guard as they fled the burning Pass of Aglon.

He was the shield at his brother’s back, the mind upon the axel-wheel of Himlad’s army. He was the one who woke a dawn’s breaking to run the troops through their rounds. He was the one the captains reported to. And he was the one who modified the Wood-elf’s method of warfare into their own. 

Cowardice. That was what other Noldor whose brains had grown thick with bitterness and rotten by prejudice called it. But Maedhros had smiled like a blade and defended their (Celegorm’s) strategy to the last. Dishonorable, Turgon’s lords had sneered. But they were already Kinslayers to those fools, Curufin would remind him: never forget we’ll be the last ones standing after they’ve buried ten-thousand ‘honorable’ soldiers.

The Wood-elves were survivors. 

The Wood-elves taught him how they used the terrain, jumping out at their prey at the most opportune moment to confuse and scatter legions of Orcs more numerous than themselves, and how to pick off Orcs like sharks swarming a kill, before melting away into the trees, leaving no trace of their existence but piled corpses. Of their Green Singers, their greatest weapon, they taught him nothing. But he taught himself how to fill in the gaps with his people’s greatest weapons.

Celegorm listened to the tales of excitable ferrets and haughty falcon. He’d heard the coons’ stories and the overlooked hedgehogs’. He mulled over the wealth of information gathered from his fury, feathered, and scaly allies of clever two-feet who imitated deer, running away from Orc packs who gave chase, forgetting the order they’d been whipped into by the sting of a lash, so eager were they for blood. Without discipline, and with triumph on their lips like raw-flesh, the Orcs would pursue the Wood-elves, only for the prey they’d thought well-caught to halt, about-face, and cut down their disorganized pursuers with Green Songs and fell laughter in their mouths.

Celegorm embraced the Wood-elves example of guerrilla warfare. While it smacked of cowardice to fools, to him it spoke at a primal level. Here was the hunt of a sophisticated predator. 

What care had he for the concept of honor when these new tactics saved his people’s lives? Celegorm knew his people were the most courageous of all the Elves, of any Children of Eru, he didn’t need to wave a scarlet banner in his enemies’ faces to prove it. The Fëanorions could march to war, and they did, but it was not their preferred method of warfare. Theirs was feigned-retreat, ambushes, and swift, compact mounted units who could ride in like striking serpents, encircle their prey, pick them off as the Orc lines broke, then mop-up the stragglers.

It was these very same tactics that had transformed the Fëanorions into the dominant, military power of Beleriand that Celegorm now attempted to pass-on to the ungrateful Nargothrondrim. It was fortunate, he thought looking at the scornful faces of these soft-bellied so-called-warriors, that Amras and Amrod were not standing here in his place to hear such folly. To think, there were Noldor who had cleaved so tightly to the Sindar they considered fighting on horseback a disadvantage! He wished he could uproot these ignorant sods and have them watch (in awe) as Amrod and Amras took their forces through their paces. 

The twins had embraced the successful mounted warfare of the plains Wood-elf tribes to such an extent their people’s culture had fundamentally changed. A child learned to ride alongside walking, and every Elf owned at least one horse on the wide plains of Estolad where one never walked anywhere they could ride.

Celegorm narrowed his eyes as the rows of Nargothrond soldiers standing before him. They glinted like colorful bugs in their unblemished armor, each piece shinned to perfection as only armor that had never seen service could achieve. They murmured to their neighbors about him, gossiping like housewives when he’d ordered them too attention!

Celegorm’s lip curled. Where was Noldorin pride? Where was the ambition, that ravenous hunger that pulled leaders and captains and heroes out of dust? Where was the indomitable _will_ he saw staring back at him from his own warriors? 

Celegorm had already decided he despised Nargothrond, but this display cemented it. Nargothrond was a land full of soft-bellied people and fat fields of food food food, with a populace so cosseted their supposed soldiers wore hair-ornaments to a disciplinary demonstration (he’d given the opal-wearing fool a tongue-lashing). What did Nargothrond know of war and suffering tucked down here in Eru’s armpit? They hadn’t picked up their swords for the war since they’d run away like cowards to hide in these hills. They were almost as disgusting as Turgon’s people, the only thing saving them in Celegorm’s mind from that unforgivable taint was the force Finrod had set North to defend the Pass of Sirion.

Celegorm prowled in-front of the assembled troops like a hunting cat. He’d summoned the 500 soldiers who were all that were left of the First and Second Tiers of Nargothrond’s army after Gwindor had gutted it and taken the experienced North. Celegorm hadn’t bothered with the newly recruited Third Tier. While they composed the meat of Nargothrond’s remaining army, they were little more than a rabble at this point. An obscene number didn’t even know to hold a sword or string a bow.

Today he’d dressed in one of the new tunics Finrod had commissioned for his guests, sheathed his feet and calves in high black boots like weapons, and buckled his sword on his hip. His hair was bound for battle, running the length of his skull down the center like a mountain range before dropping in a single long fish-tale down his back. He looked like a seasoned fighter, and knew it. They knew it too. He could see it in the way their eyes tracked him even as they stood in disorderly columns and whispered rumors about him to their friends. 

The word Kinslayer rode the air. He sneered. 

The creaking of leather came from his right shoulder. He looked back to see Himrandir’s steady eyes watching him. His captain-general’s lips were twisted in a serene smile, dismissing the insults to the Fëanorions’ character as the wailing of souls inhabiting a mud pit. 

Himrandir was born a carpenter’s son in Valinor, and was as stained in Elven-blood as the lords he followed with the same unshakable faith he had before Alqualondë and the Oath. Himrandir had no love for war, but trusted absolutely in the rightness of their cause. He believed when a conflict could not be avoided, it should be won at all cost. 

Celegorm unleashed his voice like a whip across the soldiers’ backs. “Eyes forward!” 

Arthelion, on Celegorm’s left, shifted forward in anticipation. The commander of Curufin’s spy network festered with antagonism next to Himrandir’s cool snake scales. The spy was not known for her forgiving nature. She nurtured grudges like children, until every slight had grown into a mountain, and only then would she deal out retaliation. Arthelion was very good at revenge.

The Nargothrondrims did not know Arthelion’s temperament, so they poked a sleeping bear carelessly when they insulted Arthelion’s lord. Though Arthelion was Curufin’s woman and not Celegorm’s, Celegorm liked the feel of the two pillars of loyal granite at his back, knowing, absolutely, that he could trust them with his life. 

“So,” Celegorm’s voice dropped like dangerous pebbles into the sudden silence. “The Elves of Nargothrond judge their lives of such superior value that they would _run away_ when called upon to fight for the soldiers they claimed, _in peace_ , to be their brethren?”

“No, my lor—”

“ _Silence_!” Celegorm cut off the audacious protest with a snarl that strangled like a fist. With slow, deliberate steps he stalked towards the soldier who’d been so foolish as to interrupt a superior officer. “You,” he crooked a finger at the man. “Up here.”

The soldier had some backbone, Celegorm would give him that. The soldier’s chin jutted out and his hands lay lax and improperly placed at his sides, but they did not tremble. 

Celegorm swept his eyes over the soldier’s form, letting contempt ride his face as he prowled a slow circle around the stiff man. “Do you know why I called you here today, soldier?”

“Yes, my lord,” the man turned his head to watch Celegorm’s progress out of the corner of his eye. 

Celegorm finished his circuit and stopped dead-center before the soldier. “Go ahead then, tell these men why I summoned them.”

Celegorm could hear the click in the man’s throat as he swallowed. “You brought us here because of the Second Tiers who tried to leave for the Falas. They were called as reinforcements to Tol Sirion, but they didn’t want to fight, they had wives, children.”

“Many of those soldiers fighting and dying up North have wives and children,” Celegorm dismissed the flawed, but daring defense. “Does that give those Elves the right to throw down their swords and _run_? Would that be an acceptable excuse to you if they were the ones seeking to save their own hides when Orcs and wolves are eating the bones of Nargothrond’s children?”

“N—No,” the soldier stumbled. 

“So tell me, tell your brethren,” Celegorm swept out a mocking hand to the gathered Tiers, “Why did I summon you here today?”

“Because…” The soldier licked his lips. “Because those soldiers were deserters…. and you don’t want that to happen again?” 

“Are you asking me or answering me, soldier?” Celegorm barked.

“Answering, sir!”

“Well congratulations: you failed.” Celegorm turned his back on the paling man to snap around and fix the line of troops with a glare. “Those Elves were cowards and deserters, but that is not why you are here. Oh, do not worry,” he cooed as they murmured, “the deserters will be dealt with, but you are here for a more important lesson.” He let them shift (breaking line, again!) and fret, before he ended their agony. 

He pivoted on his heel, cloak sweeping out behind him. He felt the gaze of Himrandir and Arthelion on his back and it cooled his anger. There were a pair of his own in this throng of sluggards. There were two who understood loyalty and discipline, who understood the way of war and what it meant to sacrifice for a cause.

When Celegorm turned to face the army again, the desire to bite and scratch, to punish, had smoothed from his brow, replaced by the anticipation of a challenge singing through his blood. Worthless soldiers stood before him now, but he would wring discipline from their used-up corpses if it was his final act. Now they were the standing (ornamental) army of Nargothrond, when he was through with them they would be soldiers in truth. They would be _his_. 

A smile kissed his mouth. It was time to start whipping these wastrels into shape! It was time to start laying down the law and showing them why Celegorm deserved their respect and absolute obedience. It was time to explain a few fundamental facts of army life to his future army. 

“What makes a good soldier?” His gaze tore down their ranks, searching out those with the first stirrings of leadership; the ones with the courage and heart to answer him. The ones he would raise to become his future captains.

“Bravery!” A voice in the back called out, a solider with a nose sharp as a knife, “the courage to stand up for what he believes in!”

Celegorm nodded, but let the testing go on, waiting for more.

“Honor!” Another shouted. This one’s armor was not as fine as the others. It had been forged from inferior metal by an unmastered hand. Perhaps this one had come from a lower class and had climbed out of his birth-place by the grit of his own hands.

“Strength of will!” 

“A pure heart!”

Celegorm almost snorted at that last one. None but a raw recruit could have given such a romanticized answer. He had heard enough. It was time to correct them all. 

“Yes courage, honor, endurance, these things are important,” he nodded at the ones who had spoken and watched as his simple praise lifted their shoulders and lit a spark in their eyes. “But it is _discipline_ that makes or breaks a soldier, just as it is discipline which destroys an army or elevates it to victory.” 

His words were already soaking into their skin, down to their veins and further still to their bones and hearts. So it would begin. So it always began. This was how he would win them; this was how his father and Maedhros won them. This was the weapon he wielded seldom but always had stored in the back shed: words. 

“Training, training, and more training. Training until you think you’ll die from exhaustion if you have to go through one more day, but keep dragging yourself onto this field until you can fight off your enemies off in your sleep! You want to defend your families and your home? Then you must start with following orders. In the moment of a battle there will be no time to question, no room for hesitation. To do so is to jeopardize not only your own life but the lives of your brothers around you!”

“When the Fëanorions pushed the Enemy back during the Dagor-Aglon, they did so together, as one mind, one body, with their captains at their head. When our army was holding back Morgoth’s Black Host and his unleashed Dragons at the Pass of Aglon for _seven months_ , we did so because we had trained our bodies until they could endure and our hearts until they stood firm upon the bedrock of our discipline. When this arm,” he held up his right arm like a prized jewel, “threw the spear that pierced the Dragon Gaervorn through the heart, it was able to do so because I had honed it like a weapon! I had trained my body and mind until I felt as used up as a piece of rotten wood some days, only to return to the practice fields the next! And because of my dedication I had the strength needed to slay a god!”

He paused a moment, feeling their admiration for his valor swell over his skin like sweet (but meaningless) accolades. “Without discipline an army is nothing."

“In this moment you are nothing,” he cut them down and watched their pride rebel in their faces. “But I will make you _everything_. I will make you soldiers and victors. I will make you heroes!” They licked it up from his palm and fell in love with him. 

Maedhros had once told him he had no use for heroes in war. Celegorm understood. An army fought as one. A glory-hound was nothing but a liability to the collective’s survival. But these men were not true soldiers yet, and so still believed the lies of song. They would learn the truth of heroes soon enough, but only after they’d sucked from war’s tit and swallowed her feast of horror.

“In three months time, I will select a company of you to ride with my cavalry North. Our destination will be Minas Tirith. Only the best shall earn this honor, only the strongest, the bravest: the most disciplined. Together we will seize victory!” 

They cheered. In this moment, with the sun glinting in his hair and the reflection of his birth ridding like wings upon his back, they worshiped him. At the dropping of a few words from this prince, who had grown into the size of a legend in the turning of a moment, they believed they could achieve _anything_.

*

His uncle radiated power. It was in the curve of a wrist, the flash of his long warrior-braid, the arch of a green eye, and the stretch of the jerkin over his chest with Fëanor’s star staring bold and shameless from its center. It wasn’t often Celegorm donned the power he’d inherited from Fëanor. It was rare for him to seek to turn hearts and loyalties to himself. 

Celebrimbor settled his elbows on the banister, and watched his uncle dismiss the army from the training field, ready to report with the sun’s rising and every day after. Finrod should not have handed Celegorm this power. When these troops returned from the front, they would be more Celegorm’s army than Finrod’s. But Finrod had few choices with Nargothrond emptied of experienced commanders, and Finrod himself neither having the time for such a consuming duty, nor a talent for military leadership. 

A presence joined him. He smelt cold stone and identified it as Arthelion. He did not turn to look at her. She would reveal her purpose, or not, in her own time. 

For a moment she watched the troops trek back up the High Wall towards the Tower Doors. When she shifted to face him fully, he turned as well. One thing he liked about his father’s head spy was her dislike of small talk. In her presence he felt no obligation to engage in the custom he equally despised and possessed so little talent in.

“Curufin has decided you will stay in Nargothrond when we ride North,” plain but absolute.

Celebrimbor battled with himself. His father was as controlling as ever. And yet, though he chafed under his father’s presumption, he felt cherished in a way he seldom experienced now. His father still loved him enough to think of his protection. 

“I see,” he acknowledged the command through his teeth.

Arthelion smiled unsympathetically; he expected no compassion from this quarter. Her face was like sharpened stones, hard enough to cut yourself upon. Her face was not one most would call beautiful, though her feminine charms were not something Celebrimbor had ever considered when looking upon her. She was not a woman or a man to him, just concentrated ruthlessness, asexual in her ambition and slumbering brutality. 

Message deliver, Arthelion abandoned the banister to slide away down the long, roofed balcony, as meticulous as a cat and just as alone. Celebrimbor, equally alone, turned back to watch Celegorm and his captain-general ascend the balcony stairs from the field below. 

Nargothrond was not half as hidden as they believed themselves. If Morgoth broke through the Northern fence of swords, it would not be long before he pin-pointed the cave-city’s location. There were simply too many who knew of it and were not locked away behind mountain walls like Gondolin. 

The click click click of paws was as good a sign of Celegorm’s approach as the sound of his voice. Huan rarely suffered separation from his friend. 

His uncle squeezed Celebrimbor’s shoulder before sprawling next to him, back against the banister, and one boot hooked under the other. Celegorm was the one to give him those little touches now, while Curufin held himself apart, the touches he permitted few and far between, yet all the more coveted because of that. Celegorm was the hearth-fire Celebrimbor curled up against and sought comfort from. Curufin was the aloof star he would give anything to have back.

Celebrimbor wished fiercely that they were alone to share this moment in the lazy, autumn sun. The Captain-general’s presence set an unwelcome itch between Celebrimbor’s shoulder blades. Celebrimbor’s unsociable nature was easily forgotten when he was in familiar settings with only those people around him who he trusted enough to unfold from his inward-facing shell. 

But there was something about Nargothrond that made it impossible for him to relax, and so he found himself continuously forced into tedious social situations with strangers when all he wanted was to be left alone in peace. He longed for Maeglin’s company. He could find no niche here, no place to retreat. In Gondolin he had forged a place for himself beside Maeglin, and while he’d despised the city, he found his a refuge within it. Not so in Nargothrond. And that absence of sanctuary kept him on edge and increased his antisocial tendencies exponentially. 

He shifted his feet in the silence, wishing he had something to do with his hands, longing for the occupation of forge-work. His chest felt crushed and lungs tight when he thought of his dearest (only) friend. Would he ever see Maeglin again?

“How did you find Nargothrond’s troops, my lord?” Himrandir inquired lightly, head tilted back to examine the sky as if it held some secret.

The question was aimed obviously at Celebrimbor, Himrandir would not have bothered with formality if it was his lord and friend he addressed. How Celebrimbor hated superficial talk, the pointless exchanging of pleasantries. If he was going to set his mind to conversation, he wanted there to be some meat on its bones. 

“I am sure they will be adequate after a few months under my uncle’s command,” he answered the throw-away inquiry with an equally bland response that communicated nothing of worth.

Celegorm’s mouth twitched as he wove his fingers through Huan’s shaggy head of fur. He graced Celebrimbor with a knowing smile. “Himrandir, let us call it a day well spent and come ready to beat these sluggards into the dust in the morning. Go spoil your daughter and annoy your wife.” Celegorm shoved his captain-general playfully.

Himrandir feigned offence. “You would banish me from your side?” The smile he wore transformed his face into a youth’s.

“By the Light, yes!” Celegorm laughed. “I do not fancy having your wife hunt me down if you are late for supper!”

Himrandir chuckled and bowed sweepingly to Celegorm, the plainness of his attire highlighted by the stateliness of the gesture. Celebrimbor couldn’t recall an occasion he’d seen the Captain-general dressed in anything richer than a leather jerkin and well-worn boots. “Then I shall take my leave.”

It was a simple, retiring scene, and Celebrimbor adored his uncle for it. Celegorm had perceived his unease and banished it without drawing attention to Celebrimbor’s ‘weakness.’ When Himrandir had taken his leave, Celegorm did not press Celebrimbor into conversation. He allowed the moment to idle between them, soaking up the sun’s afternoon warmth and resting in a moment of stillness. Huan’s steady panting was a drumbeat in the silence.

Celebrimbor enjoyed it. But when he found his thoughts running the well-worn paths of disquiet he shattered their journey. “Father and you are plotting.” He laid the words out like facts without the burs of accusation. They both already knew it was true.

Celegorm tilted him a look. “Curufin plots. What it is he plans he has not shared with me.” Celebrimbor looked back, unimpressed with his uncle’s profession of innocence. “But I do what I can to be ready for the hour he does,” Celegorm finished with an unrepentant smile.

“Don’t.” Celebrimbor bit the word off in the air. “Don’t stand there and lie to my face that you do not think it is wrong.”

The lips shed the smile like a false skin. “What do you want from me, Celebrimbor? To admit to doubt, to fear, to helplessness?” Celegorm’s words crackled like lightning down Celebrimbor’s spine: like the confirmation of all his worst fears.

“Then Father will do this. He will play his games and _stab our cousin in the back?_ ”

Celegorm growled, “You do not know what he plans anymore than I.”

“No, I don’t. But we both know him enough to know he will not have any interests but his own.”

With that quick-silver temper Celegorm was subject to he snapped, “Curufin’s interests are the Oath’s fulfillment, and mine are in complete alignment with his! I know my loyalty, Nephew, and it is to my family. You should consider where your own lies.”

Huan’s ears thrust forward like arrows. He whimpered low in his throat and bumped his head like a kiss against Celegorm’s hip. As if the hound’s touch sucked the aggression out of Celegorm’s bones and pressed tranquility in its place, the anger that had roused so quickly lay back down.

A silent apology for the harsh words was given with a simple brush of fingertips over the back of Celebrimbor’s hand. Celebrimbor turned his hand to catch them, giving wordless acceptance. They looked away, down onto the training field and pastures and stables beyond, and further still where the land ran into the river’s gorge like an eager lover falling head-first into love. 

“You cannot say with certainty that anyone will be hurt,” Celegorm spoke his denial to the banister.

“You cannot say they will not be,” Celebrimbor answered to his uncle’s down-turned profile. “I think…we should not have come here, Uncle.”

“Where would you have had us go? To starve in the wilderness?”

Celebrimbor subsided, knowing his argument for the paltry thing it was. Celegorm was right. No matter what happened here, how could Celebrimbor wish they had never come if the alternative was the final destruction of their people? Better to lay the blame upon the one who deserved it, who deserved all of it: Morgoth. They would not be in Nargothrond if they still had a home.

Celegorm shook himself like a dog, “Curufin will not do anything too terrible. So he makes a few lords’ lives uncomfortable for a time, what of it? These people need a little shaking up. Perhaps it will turn out in their benefit.”

His uncle didn’t truly believe his own words. But Celebrimbor was not sure Celegorm would have moved to intervene in Curufin’s plans even if standing aside meant someone outside their people was hurt. 

Celebrimbor wanted to retreat to the forge. There was nothing quite like sinking his mind into a new project to take it off the troubling world around him. He chastised himself a moment after the thought. He’d promised himself he wasn’t going to fall into that rut again. Never. He’d just have to grit his teeth and bear the real-world. It was only until they left for Estolad in the spring.

Celebrimbor drew closer to the black hole of Nargothrond with every step. Soon the sun would be stolen from his back and he wouldn’t need to shift the weight of his braided hair forward to feel the slight breeze trace kisses down his nape. It wasn’t that he felt choked and suffocated in the sun-less caverns, for he wasn’t like Celegorm who needed the forest and its beasts like a Wood-elf needed moss beneath his toes. The ceiling pressing heavy and dark upon him was the weight of yattering voices calling for his opinion, the endless stream of people clawing at him for attention, one more artificial smile frozen to his weary mouth. He wanted to tear their hands off him like sticky burs, and find a cool, quiet place of solitude. 

He wanted a forge fire’s heat against his skin and the only voices calling him the ones singing with metal’s metallic scent, gems’ chiming tinker-tink, and the vision unfurling from his mind to his hands like the looping of lush cursive under his pen.

But if he fell into that blissful escape, dropped himself onto the ocean breast of creation, he didn’t think he’d ever bother swimming to shore again. The shore was loneliness and the hound-hound-hounding of unwanted people. But the shore was also family and his father’s love like a pair of arms strangling him even as he felt his heart might explode from the ecstasy of that embrace.

He didn’t breach Nargothrond’s doors before a youth dashed himself against him. Celebrimbor’s feet didn’t budge with the blow; the youth’s mass was nothing to his tall, muscled one. The boy had spindly deer legs and a skeleton stretching up like an eager sapling too anxious for height to wait for all his limbs to grown in.

The boy pulled back with a grunt, shaking hair paler than morning sunlight from his face to stare up at Celebrimbor’s towering form. It took Celebrimbor a moment to place the child, never having spoken to Finrod’s son outside one formal introduction, but he had heard the child’s name sewn into enough conversation to have built a preconception of him. 

“Oh, hello!” cried the high, childish voice. “You are one of my cousin Curufin’s people, aren’t you? I think I’ve seen you before! Do you know if Lord Celegorm is still in the training fields with the army? I heard he was giving a speech and I wanted to hear! It’s not over is it?” The boy bit his lip, face open as a flower and screaming its distress. Celebrimbor thought it a fortunate thing one so young had not been privy to his uncles’ words.

“The army has long been dismissed. I am afraid you are out of luck. Excuse me,” he tried to slip passed the child. 

“Wait!” Gildor latched himself onto Celebrimbor’s arm. Celebrimbor jerked at the sudden contact, unused to touching those he shared no emotional intimacy with. “Where’re you going? You could tell me what he said couldn’t you? I want to be in the army when I grown up. I’m going to fight in the war, just like Gwindor and Gelmir. I’m going to be a hero!”

Celebrimbor shook the boy off. His chest felt tinny like the chest of a pigeon. Then he was swinging around to stare at the naive little boy whose face was sugared as the moon with almonds for eyes. Behind his eyelids he saw children covered in Orc intestines, others with half their faces burnt off, their eyes glazed with a pain so intense it bled into shock. 

“You know nothing of battle, or death, or the horror of seeing friends and innocents die pointless deaths in agony,” his voice was low enough to pound gravel. “One day you will learn of these things, as all must in these forsaken lands, but do not wish so eagerly for the loss of your innocence.”

The child’s mouth gapped like a hole, like a babe’s waiting for its mother to feed it. Celebrimbor turned away from the shock painted like yellow dye all over Gildor’s face. He didn’t care if his words were unnecessarily harsh. 

He didn’t take five steps before the sound of pursuing feet hit his ears and sent them itching. But when the youth caught up and tried to match Celebrimbor’s swift strides with two jogging ones of his own, no more questions tumbled into the air. The boy said nothing, but Celebrimbor could feel eyes pressing into the side of his face, and the palpability of their curiously was the weariness of a hundred interrogations.

The boy’s silence could not hold. They made it through the Tower Doors and a great enough distance towards the guest wing before Gildor spoke. Celebrimbor was grudgingly grateful for the boy’s restraint –he had heard things about the king’s son, and self-control was not one of them.

When the boy did speak it was nothing Celebrimbor expected. “My mother died protecting me.” The voice was still the high one of a boy’s, but the excitement that had given it a life and buoyancy all its own was gone. “She died to save me, and maybe I’m not very clever, and maybe I don’t know much of anything important, but I want to be brave like her. I want to be a hero because I want to save people like my mother saved me.” 

The boy’s jaw was a stubborn arch, chin pointed up at Celebrimbor like an arrow-tip, daring Celebrimbor to mock him. The set of his shoulders told Celebrimbor even if he’d wanted to speak of the foolishness (the selflessness) of this ambition, his words would have bounced like pebbles against the boulder of Gildor’s resolve.

Celebrimbor let the silence draw on with no response. He expected the moment to stretch until it felt thin as paper and as uncomfortable as an inappropriate sketch. But it didn’t. 

Gildor jogged along at his side, head swinging to study Celebrimbor’s profile for a moment, before twisting away again when something in the corridors caught his eye. The boy would wave at people he knew, calling out a cheerful greeting, but never swerving from his dogged pace beside Celebrimbor.

The time for choosing his final destination came upon Celebrimbor quicker than he liked. Take the right-hand turn and gain the illusionary peace of his chambers which were opposite his father’s and thus denied any true peace of mind for every thought tucked back around to worry. Or take the left and settle for Nargothrond’s library which could offer no true peace when Elves were constantly flittering here and there, brushing too close to his table or even approaching him for conversation (sycophanting more likely as not).

“Where are we going?” The piping voice was an echo of his thoughts. But _we_? 

Celebrimbor did not answer nor look down at the child. He marched forward like a ship coming to dock that could not be slowed. His steps were long and crisp with purpose, as if no doubt had ever touched him. He took the right-hand path.

“I have not been down here since the Fëanorions came,” Gildor shared, trotting after him. “Do you think we might see my cousin Curufin?”

Celebrimbor frowned, “Why do you seek Curufin?”

“Oh well,” Gildor smiled sheepishly, “no reason really, I just….well he’s so often busy, and I don’t see him much, He’s just—” The youth flapped his hands about as if hoping they’d knock against the right word, “interesting.”

Celebrimbor stopped walking. A moment’s hesitation, and he pivoted around, going back the way he’d come.

“What—”

“The library. I need some peace and quiet,” he cut the question off.

“But,” Gildor followed right after him like a mosquito refusing to be shooed. “The library is almost as busy as the Great Hall! It’s not quiet at all!”

“Solitude and peace are qualities unknown to Nargothrond, so I must make them where I can.”

“Why do you want to be alone?”

“To think.”

“Couldn’t you do that in your room?”

“No.”

“What do you want to think about?”

“Enough,” Celebrimbor lost his patience. 

Gildor subsided for the length of a corridor before starting again. But as before, it seemed keeping his tongue stilled for a moment forced the boy to think before he spoke, and he said with the air of contemplation: “There aren’t many places to be alone in the city besides one’s chambers. It’s all very…” he swung his arms about, “crowded. All the time. But I do know one secret place. Well it’s not really a secret, just not everyone is allowed in. In the royal wing we have a garden –one of the only places in the city where plants can grow! It’s very quiet in the Sunset Garden. I could show it to you, only…” Gildor’s brows drew together and he looked up at Celebrimbor, suddenly all seriousness. “Beleth goes there. I could take you there, but you shouldn’t bother her unless she talks to you first.”

“I have no intention of being a nuisance to anyone. I would be in your debt if I could achieve peace to clear my mind in this place,” he said with all the gravity of a graveyard. 

Gildor’s smile could have swallowed the world. It would have been a better one if it lived in that brightness.

“You should not...” Celebrimbor stumbled upon the block of his ineloquence, “you should not demean yourself. You obviously possess a measure of cleverness.”

Gildor jerked his eyes away, mouth hardening. “Don’t tell lies. I hate it when people lie to me just because they know who I am and want something from me. Just….don’t.”

“That was not my intention.”

Gildor’s nose flared like a buck’s before a charge. “I’m not an idiot, even if I’m not smart. I know I am not good at clever things, and I know how many times people have played me for a fool because I couldn’t read the lies in their eyes.” His chest heaved like a bird on the cusp of flight, or a babe before a wail. “I may not be good at anything that makes a worthy Noldo, but I am not _stupid_.”

Celebrimbor was unsure how to respond to the sudden outburst. If Gildor’s emotions were a physical apparition, lighting would be forking across the sky and the window shutters banging like spoons upon tin pans. He blinked at Gildor, slowly, ponderously for so long the boy’s cheeks lost their hectic red and the skin about his eyes scrunched up in abashment. 

“Um…I can take you to the garden now, if you’d like?” Gildor suggested, offering Celebrimbor a relentless smile.

The air smelt damp like the aftermath of a thunderstorm’s heaving. It crackled like renewal. “Yes,” Celebrimbor agreed, voice soft lest he print his hands all over something as delicate as the first bud after winter’s hunger. Gildor’s face was sweet, his hair like fairy wings, his confidence a hard steel rod twisted into beautiful, fragile things that threatened to snap under Celebrimbor’s brusqueness.

Gildor’s dimples pressed like thumb-prints into his cheeks. 

Celebrimbor followed after him as Gildor fairly skipped off down the corridor, eyes flashing back to reassure himself of Celebrimbor’s continued presence. Celebrimbor found he did not want the boy to stop talking when he took up chattering once more. It wasn’t what Gildor was saying; it was the way all the words ran together in Celebrimbor’s mind like a river under which his own thoughts churned like the gears of a finely-tuned machine. Gildor’s river did not disrupt their flow, but enhanced it, lying like a blanket between the chaos of Nargothrond and the tranquility Celebrimbor’s mind demanded.

The Sunset Garden opened before them like a womb. The cave’s stone roof was missing in places where ancient cave-ins had occurred, leaving pockets of light to shine down from the surface. Flowers grew in modest clusters around the light beams, and an underground stream wove through their legs, its flanks sheathed in damp-loving moss with tinny white star-flowers poking rare as diamonds from the furry bellies. 

The garden was empty but for the curvy form of an Edain woman bent over a lyre and plucking it with absent fingers. Her head crooked up like a sharp-nosed wadding bird at their arrival, but her eyes were strangely absent, starring off to the side as they entered. 

“Hello Beleth,” Gildor called softly, but he did not approach her. 

She hummed as she plucked the strings and Celebrimbor could not tell if it was in greeting or a line of song she practiced.

“She’ll come over if she wants to talk,” Gildor explained and steered them to a bench further along a moss path. Stalagmite rose like bushes beside it. 

The garden was beautiful as a dragonfly was: bizarre, graceful, and cold-blooded. But it gave Celebrimbor exactly what he craved in its exclusivity. 

Celebrimbor leaned back on his palms, elbows locking, and the curves of hard muscles flirting with the skin of his forearms where he’d rolled his tunic sleeves up. He closed his eyes and watched the world dance away in the darkness behind them. He did not call it back into his arms.

And all the while Gildor talked. Celebrimbor could not have said what about, but there was a strange comfort in the chatter. Celebrimbor craved solitude, but it always came at the price of loneliness, with only the beating of a hammer and the hiss of forge-fire for company. Now he felt both refreshed and warmed. He had not experienced a joining of the two since his Maeglin and he hammered out the rhythm in their hearts as the two of them –together—sought the refuge of creation. 

Strange that a boy he’d originally found a pest would be the one to return the comfort to this searching. Gildor talked and Celebrimbor breathed in the smell of wet stone, moss, and the soft floral of lilies. The Adan started plucking her lyre with intent, and though the melody did not have the smoothness of Elven-hands, it was a pleasing addition to the quiet burbling of the brook.

The music trailed off and Celebrimbor opened his eyes. Gildor watched his face, and the moment Celebrimbor turned to look down at him, Gildor closed his mouth and smiled, his teeth like stars in the meager sunlight. “Gelmir does that sometimes.”

“Hmm?” Celebrimbor folded his body back into straight lines, muscles shifting under his skin. Gildor, showing all the promise of his mother’s Sinda-blood in the slenderness of his limbs, was a lanky thing next to Celebrimbor’s height and strength of body.

“Goes off in his head to think.”

“Does he like it when you talk, too?” The question was artlessly.

Gildor laughed, delight infusing the sound ringing like bells off the cave’s rock walls. “You didn’t mind? Only, most people don’t care for my _chatter_ ,” he said the word like a regurgitation. “Gelmir doesn’t mind so much. He knows I like to talk –it doesn’t matter if no one’s listening, I just talk about things to myself—but I don’t think he really _likes_ it. It is just something he does for me,” Gildor shrugged. 

Celebrimbor didn’t know if or how to comment to that. His tongue felt swollen with the heaviness of a thousand unlearned conversations. 

“Are you in the Fëanorion army?” Gildor bounced to a new subject with the spontaneity of a blue-jay.

“Yes and no.” Celebrimbor found himself elaborating when Gildor leaned forward, close enough to feel the longing pulsing off the child’s skin like shedding heat. He was hesitant to encourage the child’s fixation upon the path of war, and yet that look in those eyes cajoled him into speaking. “I have commanded units in the past and fought in many battles, but I do not consider it my profession, merely a necessity. If one can live in the North and _not_ be a default member of the army, then that is what I would choose.”

Gildor’s mouth opened wide and bright on the next question, “You’re a captain?”

Celebrimbor frowned, looking away. Finally: “I am Curufin’s son, and thus, yes, a captain by merit of birth if not by worth.”

“Oh!” Gildor’s hands flew to cover his mouth. “I remember now! I met you! You’re my cousin!”

“Yes. It was some weeks ago.” He did not add that the boy should have remembered. Elven-memory would have guaranteed it, for Gildor was not young enough to still be subjected to forgetfulness, and yet he did not for a moment think Gildor faked his forgetfulness.

Gildor’s face pinched as if following the trail of Celebrimbor’s thoughts. “I’m not so good with remembering things,” his gaze dropped to his hands, lying like dead birds in his lap.

The previously self-assured form slumped in shamed dejection. “There are worse things to fail at.” It came out too curt and would not have ranked as comfort by most estimates, but Gildor’s head shot up and his mood reversed with the swiftness of youth.

Gildor latched onto his hand as if they were bosom friends. Celebrimbor tried to think of a way to re-build distance between them as Gildor pleaded: “Tell me about the North? What is your home like? I wish I could visit! Well,” Gildor amended at Celebrimbor’s darkening countenance, “not now of course. But before. And when I am older—” Gildor wisely did not finish the wish.

Celebrimbor was spared delivering the terse answer sitting on his tongue, too irritated by the boy’s continued suicide wish to swallow back, by the Adan. She had wandered over as if in a dream, stopping to pick up rocks and stuff clumps of moss in her pockets. 

She drew close now, and without even a word of greeting, reached over to pat Gildor on the head like a puppy. Her hand looked soft as it brushed through the milky strands, but showed the first signs of age: fine cracks in the skin, the bones a little too knobby.

“Nice to see you too, Beleth,” Gildor nuzzled into the hand as if it were a great treasure bestowed upon him. “I liked your playing.”

Beleth’s face split wide, the fine wrinkles about her eyes crinkling. It was the expression of a child hung upon the face of a middle-aged woman. “Dor,” she laughed, her eyes dancing from theirs, elusive as fireflies.

“Beleth, this is my cousin Celebrimbor,” Gildor introduced. “Celebrimbor, Beleth daughter of Bregolas. She is a lady of Bëor’s House.”

“Lady Beleth,” Celebrimbor did not try to take her hand, merely inclining his head and pressing his fist into his breast. “Well met.”

She laughed like a star would, all tinkling brightness. “Friends now?”

“If you would like,” Celebrimbor answered calmly. He thought of Elven warriors released from the healers with head wounds beyond their skill to mend. Some died from the brokenness of their _hröa_ , others lived on, enduring like teeth of stone in a dessert. 

“You like my brac’et?” Beleth held up her wrist for his inspection. Delicately beaten squares of silver were linked together and encrypted with Khazâd runes.

“It is a fair work indeed,” he touched the planes of silver, feeling the raised edges of runes under the pads of his fingers and the coolness of metal. 

Beleth giggled a little-girl’s laugh, and pulled back her hands to clap, “Yes, yes, yes! The Dwarvsis gives it to me!” She swayed away as if pulled by the current of an imaginary stream. Celebrimbor watched her ramble off down the path, bending to trial her fingers in the water and pluck a bud off a bleeding heart.

“Gelmir says soldiers need to know the ones they fight for are safe. He says no solider fights as well as the one who knows his greatest treasure is locked away safe, but not so safe he has nothing to fight for,” Gildor nodded his head as if agreeing to his cousin’s words all over again. “That’s why Belegund didn’t take Beleth home, Gelmir says. Belegund is Beleth’s brother. When he left he wanted to take Beleth with him, but he didn’t because she was his treasure and he needed her safe.” Gildor blinked up at Celebrimbor, “What is it you think about keeping safe when you’re a soldier?”

Celebrimbor’s mouth clamped tight against the too-invasive question. But he couldn’t dam off the avalanche of memories spinning like a carousel in his mind’s-eye: Maedhros snarling like an animal on top of him, eyes dirty and unseeing with Angband a veil over the waking world. Maeglin curled like a fist in the fur before a hearth, hair shinning strings of black stars and a rare, unguarded smile gifted to Celebrimbor and Celebrimbor alone. Celegorm sighting down an arrow-shaft as he took Celebrimbor hunting in a different life –in Valinor. 

And his father, always his father, a bitter-sweet ache at the back of his throat. His father who he loved and would die for (had killed for on that day he refused to remember); who he would give _anything_ to touch his ear with nothing but Celebrimbor in his eyes as he said ‘Little Fist’ like he did when Celebrimbor was a child. Curufin who Celebrimbor never wanted to become. The love pushed though the hungry pores of his skin, throbbing his father’s name.

Celebrimbor knew all the angles of their skeletons and the curves of their hearts. 

A rock lodged in his throat when the Dragon-fire burned their home and thousands of lives behind them. He had been suffocating for weeks, months, unable to sleep without nightmares haunting him every time his father or uncle left the safety of Nargothrond and he dreamed violence and fire and their eyes, dead, unable to escape the fear that had been pressing on him like claustrophobia. He had looked into the eye of Morgoth’s Power and been trapped on the slow slide of despair.

Celebrimbor’s shoulders uncurled. The bitterness and fear that had been rusting his resolve flaked off like so much ash. He had forgotten the blood in his veins, the shields at his back, the bands bonding him hotter than any Dragon-fire. He was a Fëanorion, and a Fëanorion never bowed to despair. A Fëanorion did the impossible and laughed in the face of a Vala’s Power, and rose like phoenixes from the ashes of burnt homes and dreams to build new, stronger ones on top. 

Celebrimbor rose with confidence a gold chain upon his breast. He’d almost forgotten the boy in the intensity of his inward resurrection. Gildor cocked his head, a little frown pressing between his slender brows. 

“You have done me a service gifting the peace of this garden,” Celebrimbor said with the solemnity of a prince. “I would offer you a favor in thanks if I might have leave to come again.”

The boy’s lips parted, eyes blinking, before he jumped up with a smile. Celebrimbor noticed Gildor did not grab for his hand, a suddenly shy air about the boy as he slid glances up at him as if Celebrimbor had transformed into something untouchable but transfixing. Yet when Gildor spoke, it was with the self-assurance Celebrimbor had become accustomed to: “You don’t have to give me a gift. I suppose if you wanted to, you could get my father something, as he’s the one the garden belongs to, really. But you should come whenever you like. I’m sure Father would agree.” 

Celebrimbor acknowledged the child’s words with an incline of his head, and then he was striding away. He had a forge calling his name and the beginnings of a new project blooming in his mind. This wasn’t about escape. 

Nargothrond’s forges left something to be desired, but maybe he could ask Finrod to allow the Fëanorions to construct an addition to the smithies, one with more privacy? It seemed a reasonable request. He began sketching the new forge out in his mind, his smile glinting like a slice of eager moon.


	64. Letters

Intermission: Letters

My dear Uncle,

Perhaps I should have begun this letter with a less informal salutation, but I must confess to selfishness, for it does me good to address a family member thus in these uncertain and darkened days.

Yes, you have read that aright. The confidence I once held absolutely in my ability to hold Minas Tirith has wavered. When last I wrote, I was convinced Morgoth’s forces –even led by Gorthaur—would crash upon our defenses like a flying sparrow against glass. I thought to myself then: surely the might of the Noldor’s swords, the superiority of our position, and the determination in our hearts would sustain us. But that was before winter descended in full. 

Never in all my years keeping faithful stewardship of your fortress, have I experienced such temperatures as if the very wind of the Helcaraxë has been tunneled down by some fell Power to knock against our bones and freeze our hearts. It is the kind of cold that kills cattle. The Edain of Dorthonion suffer greatly; everyday it seems news of another elderly found frozen in their bed reaches us (may The One take mercy upon their souls). 

The River Sirion has frozen over in places, a feat I did not think possible, and one that struck a blow to our backs unlooked for. Wolves and orcs slip passed our outer-defenses daily, and our losses mount. I have ordered a wider perimeter to be set, and hope this will shore up our defenses; but where once we stood strong and thick, now our lines spread too thin as the area of possible penetration tripled.

It is a sorry state you would find us in now, Uncle, if you were to make the journey. Our fuel for fires dwindles, and our cavalry have suffered too many losses to the cold. The poor souls go in the mornings to tend their beloved mounts only to find stiff corpses where once was a friend. 

This letter will find you only days from receiving Finduilas if all goes well. I have sent her (and the greater portion of our civilian population) to safety in your halls. As you know, the restrictions I placed upon my men in the regard of civilian habitation of a military out-post was a hard one to maintain during the years of relative peace. But now I am thankful that but for the few hundred men who had wives and children, our non-combatant population never exceeded that which could be evacuated with only minor discomfort.

I wish I could add that my wife rides with them, but while Nessy and I have agreed Finduilas is safest in Nargothrond, Nessy will not consent to leave me. 

Oh Uncle, I can’t convey with words the grief it has caused me to see the way my dear one suffers! She is everything that is fair and noble and valiant, a true lady of the Noldor. But in the night, when she thinks the exhaustion of this long war has dragged me into sleep, I hear her weeping to the darkness. And what comfort can I give her? What hope? 

A Darkness has laid itself upon us in this place, as if Morgoth has stretched out his hand and taken hold of our hearts with his black grip. The sun does not rise any longer, or perhaps Anor is faithful but cannot pierce the blanket of fog that has lain itself down upon our once clear vale. 

Finduilas, at the least, will be free of this choke-hold. She was not made for despair, and it pains me to see her so downcast. I have entrusted her to our cousin, Gwindor, and have the utmost faith in his ability to bring her safely to your arms. 

I have found Gwindor to be a singularly good-hearted sort, with the honor of a true soldier, and have leaned much upon him these last two years. He has been a most trusted lieutenant, and I thank you in my heart everyday for sending him in my need. 

His brother also is of noble soul, though one more given to scholarship than war. Of their father though…Guilin is as wild as ever, and I cannot name myself well-pleased to have him among our numbers. A bold fighter he is to be sure, but too reckless and devious. I prefer a practical man, one of virtuous character and strong heart who speaks his mind plainly and without guile. 

Gwindor is such a man, and I must confess to a small machinate. I noticed Gwindor showed signs of enjoying my daughter’s company, and so I have attempted to throw the two of them together whenever duties allow. I cannot yet see the fruit of this in Finduilas’ countenance, but Gwindor holds her in high regard. I would not be displeased if I were privileged to announce such a union. 

Now though, my hand must pen a woe that you have been so generous to receive on many occasions past, and once again I shall entreat upon your indulgence with a request. I would implore you to give me some relief from those two most quarrelsome and patronizing of Elves: Fëanor’s sons.

For long months I have endured their company, and many times I have laid out my grievances to you as my lord and uncle. But now, hear me when I say: Their presence has become too grating to bear! You would offer me the counsel of patience and steadfastness as you have often before, and yet Uncle, I truly cannot abide this indignity another month. 

Yes, it is as you have said in the past: they have been of some help upon the front (I will not claim a lack of bias against their achievements –do not ask that of me); but, in truth, it is their soldiers we cannot do without, not their lords. Surely some other commander can be found to take up the leadership of Curufin and Celegorm’s forces? Or, if all else is denied, at least grant me relief from having to suffer _two_ demeaning smirks and haughty necks. Send Curufin away! I would rather deal with the elder, for Celegorm is more alike myself in temperament (you see, I can admit this at least!), and is a man of action and levelheadedness upon the battlefield, and has none of Curufin’s slyness which you know I so despise.

If my stewardship has not displeased you, then spare me this affront, I beg you. I will not profess to write these words from a place absent of pride, but I will claim it is a pure pride: the pride of a general who has seen his command usurped by those who would scorn and undermine him. I do not have the luxury of threatening to surrender my duty if this humiliation continues, but I beseech you Uncle, as a steward and general to his lord and king, name once I have ever failed to do my duty to my upmost, name but one occasion where my command of your armies, my devotion to the protection of our people, has failed. I have searched by heart and memory and can no-where find grounds for the indignity these two blackguards, these abominations of Noldor, these tyrannical Fëanorions have visited upon me!

I plead you will not deliberate long over my appeal, and release me for this added burden.

I remain, respectfully and loving yours,

Orodreth son of Angrod  
Steward of Minas Tirith  
High-General of Nargothrond 

Finrod folded the letter carefully and set it aside. Orodreth would not be sending Finduilas south unless the situation had become dire. If Minas Tirith fell, if the Pass was breached, then the realm of Nargothrond would lay within Morgoth’s grasp. Morgoth would have an artery into Nargothrond, and would be sure to thrust his full strength upon them. If the Pass fell, they would have war unending upon their northern border. 

He had chosen Orodreth above Angrod or Aegnor to hold this most crucial defense, both because the sons of Finarfin had agreed Orodreth showed a natural talent for commanding armies, and because Finrod had seen with his own eyes Orodreth’s tenacity on the field of battle. There was something Orodreth said after the Glorious Battle where he proved his mettle as a war leader: It wasn’t the larger army who held the day, it was the one that continued to fight on when both were convinced they’d lost the field.

Oroderth had been so young, so optimistic in those days; they’d all been. Angrod’s son may have been born in Valinor, but he remembered little of it. He’d grown up in exile, crossing the Ice, and come into his majority only a few years after the sun’s rising. He was a man who believed in hard work, but was also given to the contemplation of deeper matters. Yet for all his skill in commanding armies, he had none when it came to the subtleties of politics and rule.

Finrod opened the bottom draw of his desk and slipped Orodreth’s letter in with a bundle of others, all marked with his nephew’s precise hand. Next to them lay a carved box inlayed with ivory and banded with silver about its middle. He retrieved it and set it upon the desk with all the care he would have handled a Silmaril. The delicate clasp clicked, and taking a fortifying breath, he opened it.

Two parcels of letters sat side-by-side, each carefully gathered and arranged by date. He’d not saved all their letters, only the ones he’d found especially comforting or poignant; he wished he had treasured every word they’d ever written no matter the content. He wished he still had the ones they’d sent him as jokes in their youth, the ones detailing troop movements that fairly shown with their optimism (Orodreth was so much like his father in this). He wished he still had the ones from Aegnor criticizing his choice to settle so far south in _caves_. 

They were gone, just like those letters; and just like the letters he wished he could remember all their details. He wished he’d paid more attention to his younger brothers. But in Valinor they had been so different, so much younger than him. They had run in different circles and Finrod had been so consumed with things that no longer seemed to matter. He’d loved them, but he’d not known them well. He was their distant older brother, the one Father leaned on, and everyone spoke of with such approval (at least until the tunes changed to censure over his religious heresy).

After Alqualondë and during the Ice, Finarfin’s children had cleaved together, the shared horror of the experience giving them a basis of common ground they’d never shared in Valinor. But after a time, as they chose different paths in Beleriand, that intense closeness had drifted away as years passed with no more than letters and sporadic visits connecting them. 

Now they were sundered by death. And until death found Finrod also, they were lost to him, for he did not believe the Exiles would walk the streets of Valinor again in this life-time. He wished he had not wasted all those years in distance. He wished he had known them better. Now he would never discover the secrets of his brothers’ hearts, never be the confident they chose over Fingon or a son of Fëanor; never come to love them with the love of a friend, one who loved them because they chose too, because they found something special enough in them to choose them above all others.

*

A letter arrived by raven’s foot, scarcely eluding an Orc arrow through the bird’s stuttering ribs. The hand of a weary-faced messenger passed it into his general’s. Orodreth sat huddled under a wolf-fur cloak as his fingers (nails stained with Orc-blood and the accumulated dirt he was too exhausted to scrub free) tore greedily into it, recognizing Finrod’s second, covert seal: 

—Winter has swept down upon us and closed her white arms about our neck here as well. Not two days after the treasure you spoke of arrived, we suffered a snowfall the like of which I have never witnesses this far south. We are snowed in at the moment, and word has reached me the Pass is likewise impassable.

This unnatural weather disturbs me greatly. I can do no more than trust in the strength of leadership you have ever shown yourself to possess upon the battlefield. I chose you to be my shield against Angband because I knew I could find no better general. Do not doubt yourself. Not in this. 

But now I must implore upon that exceedingly analytical mind of yours. I will not ask that you turn that mind to a field outside of warfare, for I know how you despise politics, but surely your injured pride has not blinded you to the value of those two burdens you claim to be nearly irrelevant? Were it even possible to recall that burden you wrote of, I would not do so. It is not because I doubt you, but because I will not allow us to underestimate the Enemy again. You are correct when you wrote that you give that burden too little credit. Have I not assured you of my satisfaction in your performance that you would lower yourself to such a punitive grudge? Forgive me for these hard words, but I will not dance a game of polite falsities. Not with you.

I would council you: Do not let your pride overrule you practicality. Do not let the burden’s actions compromise your own duty or dignity.

The one you set such high regard for and entrusted with your treasure, sends his regards. He is anxious to return to you and the others he loves and left in your protection.

May we outlast this foul winter, and look upon spring’s renewal once more.


	65. Chapter 52

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 52

Finrod stood, regal and crystallized with grief. In the Great Hall the breathing of a thousand souls was loud as a heartbeat. All the lamps were lit, and there was something merciless in the white and blue flames that would have been healed in the sun’s fire. All eyes were pointed towards Finrod where he stood, mouth sealed, upon the dais. The empty seats of the High Table were like the gaps of violently removed teeth. They sucked the eye like voids. 

Faces once occupied those holes: Gelmir, Orodreth’s wife Nessellui, and many more nameless as well as faceless to Curufin. The Fëanorion dead were not among the empty chairs, though that did not signify dishonor, merely their guest status in these halls. 

The Fëanorions did not need solemn Feasts of Remembrance thrown by Outsiders to be honored and remembered with the fierceness of loyalty their people were infamous for. Quiet Rites of the Dead had already been held (without bodies to burn in most cases) for those Fëanorion soldiers who fell in Tol Sirion’s capture and their ensuing retreat. 

On the whole, Curufin considered their work in Tol Sirion to be well done, despite the loss of Minas Tirith. They made the Enemy pay so dearly for the victory, that their own dead bought them a few months, even as great as a year’s grace period. Nargothrond could not afford to wallow in shock and grief during that respite though. Their Northern border now rubbed up against the farthest reaches of Morgoth’s power. It would not be long before he made use of the proximity. 

“We break bread tonight in memory of those brave soldiers who fell in our people’s defense. We life our glasses and remember the lives they sacrificed so selflessly so that we might sit in safety today. Hail the dead!” Finrod raised his glass, toasting the chairs standing silent and still as empty eye sockets.

“The dead!” The hall chanted as one and followed Finrod’s lead in drinking.

Finrod sat, a heaviness in the gesture that spoke of a private grief he’d not permitted to shake his voice. Too more pieces of his family lost. Orodreth sat hollow and empty-eyed at Finrod’s elbow, his daughter’s wane face beside him. 

Curufin was ready to eat, his hand already reaching for his knife, when a lord stood. Curufin frowned, slicing a look back at Finrod. There was a blink of surprise, a shadow of distaste, before Finrod waved jeweled fingers at the lord, permitting him to speak.

“Forgive me, my king,” the lord said, but Curufin did not think he sounded the least bit sorry for speaking out of turn at a feast where the king was the customarily only speaker. It smacked of politics. This may be a Feast of Remembrance, but it was still a court, and Curufin had learned quickly that the subtle shifting of power in Nargothrond politics usually revolved around religion.

The lord’s doublet was stitched with a bold, centralized blooming rose of blood red. It was not uncommon for an Elf to advertise which of the three Nargothrond sects he belonged to so audaciously. Everyone in Nargothrond had long associated roses in full-bloom with the Order of the Faith. 

Curufin lanced his fingers in his lap, leaning back in his chair. He turned his gaze away from the speaker and back to Finrod. The odious Order of the Faith toady began droning about The One, re-birth, and even more disgustingly: Námo’s consecrated place in The One’s preordained symphony. What self-respecting Noldo would call _that_ Vala righteous after he’d Cursed them? For they had been Cursed. Curufin saw the evidence in Morgoth’s continued supremacy. If they had never been Cursed, Morgoth would be a groveling worm under Fëanor’s heel. But no Vala’s Curse was going to obstruct their ultimate victory. Fëanor’s sons would prevail, and the Silmarils would one day lie upon their breasts as they heralded in the dawn, and the Light of the Silmarils made all things new.

After the lord finished pounding his beliefs against their skulls, one of the Sons of Eru members stood, wishing to do the same. Thank mercy Gwindor stood up just a hair’s breath after the former, and held the floor by rank. Gwindor, despite the daintily stepping doe pin at his neck, wasn’t a bore according to Celegorm. Curufin did not know this cousin well, despite having fought together in Tol Sirion, but he trusted Celegorm’s judgment. And more, he doubted the grieving Elf was aiming for a power-play on the day of his brother’s Remembrance Feast. 

So it was. The Sons of Eru devotee was forced to yield to Gwindor, and Gwindor put an end to the politics by leading the hall in a simple remembrance of The One for the bounty, and inviting the gathered Elves to partake.

“About time,” Celegorm groused in his ear. Curufin smirked at his brother. Celegorm had learned the rules of the game, but he would always choose a good hunt over court maneuvers any day. 

As the hall began the first course of the feast, Curufin made a note to keep his ear to Nargothrond’s rumor heartbeat. There had been some harmless jests between soldiers on the front, which mattered none at all for the soldiers’ respect for Celegorm was absolute, but if those jokes spread to the mouths of mockers Curufin would act.

Celegorm carried unique strengths, strengths that were a boon in war. He was as fine an archer as any Wood-elf, knew the forests and loved them as well as any of that kindred, and had mastered more tongues of beasts than any other Elf alive. Curufin could never be ashamed of Celegorm, but fools would whisper about things they did not understand. Curufin would not allow the words ‘Celegorm’ and ‘Moriquendi’ to be spoken in the same breath. They may not be in Aglon now, but Curufin had built a capstone of power here; he had enough to protect what was most important.

Curufin sipped his wine and listened with one ear to Celegorm’s conversation with Himrandir. His gaze slipped ever back to his target. The war had impeded his mission, but now he was once again a permeated fixture of these halls, they could be removed from the back-burner. 

Finrod had angled his body towards Orodreth, and was trying to pull his nephew out of dark thoughts with conversation. The way Finrod fingered the Nauglamír upon his neck told Curufin he was worrying. Orodreth’s eyes were caught and stolen by Finrod’s brilliance; how could they not be? 

Orodreth was a blunt instrument with no more ambitions than a toad, who inevitably gave away all his chess pieces before an hour in his company was up. He would never be a great man or a brilliant one: he was stuck at mediocre. 

And yet Finrod smiled at him. He gave Orodreth one of his bright, beautiful smiles Curufin had only ever snatched from the side. Never aimed at _him_. Curufin hated Orodreth.

 _Patience now_ , he cautioned himself. He’d moved too swiftly in the beginning rounds of the game. He couldn’t afford to be anything less than perfect, and hasty moves resulted in errors. A good player understood his own ambition, and was able to set them on a slow simmer, because moving too quickly or unwisely could cost him all. 

Curufin had always known Finrod had many friends and admirers. It had been thus in Tirion, and it was no different now. That Orodreth would be added to that number was no surprise. Curufin must remember the mission. He’d never needed friends, and certainly didn’t need Finrod to become one. Curufin had his brothers, his son, his father, what else could he possibly require? 

No, he did not seek friendship from Finrod; the mission went much deeper than that.

Curufin watched Finrod, cataloging all those little details he collected like exotic butterflies and slipped into the ordered files that were Finrod’s place in his mind. He knew Finrod’s exact scent when coming back from a ride, and the one Finrod wore in the morning before he’d had a chance to bathe because Curufin had surprised him with an unexpected visit. Curufin had preserved every small slice of time they’d shared, and horded them for leisurely examination so that he might methodically analyze every tinny nuance that made up Finrod. 

Now Curufin noted the gems Finrod had strung through his hair, the way he’d done it up in the traditional Noldorin braids and placed his prized Nauglamír on his throat and favorite rings on his fingers. Finrod used these trappings like armor. 

Curufin strained his ears to hear the pitch of Finrod’s voice, wanting its curves to run over his skin. Finrod’s voice changed depending on the subject and recipient: for theology it was deep and cultured, the way Curufin remembered from Tirion; when the focus was scientific or Nargothrond’s craftsmanship, it was the excited rhythm of an artist let loose to gush about his newest project; when it was Gildor his voice was soft like starlight and just as refined. When it was about the past though, Finrod’s voice would tightened like a lid’s closing, the click of a lock sliding into place with finality.

Despite Finrod’s smile, Curufin saw the way he picked at his meat and knew he was troubled. He saw how Finrod took an over-large gulp of wine, drinking too quickly for decorum. But despite these signs of discomfort, Finrod radiated light and beauty, and drew a thousand admiring gazes from the hall. 

A rush of desire rose between Curufin’s ribs. It wrung his bones irregular with want. Finrod stood in the sun, adored by all, while Curufin watched from the shadows. Finrod was made of stars. Curufin wanted to swallow stars. His soul was hungry.

(He could gnaw on the bones of his own imperfections until they bled, but he could never wash himself bright enough to reach his father. For all his callousness in the face of other’s failings, he was the one forever falling short of the perfection he demanded.)

The feast was drawing to a close, when Orodreth pushed back his chair and splayed his fingers like fans. It took a few moments, but eventually the hall quieted. Curufin shifted forward. Finrod had a little worry-worm pressed between his brows. Curufin’s eyes darted over Orodreth’s face, trying to determine his intent. Orodreth did not wield Finrod’s political power, but he was a player in the game; he just rarely illustrated it. 

“Those of you who know me,” Orodreth began in that soft, undisturbed way of his, “will know I am not one for speech making.” This pulled a chuckle from those few occupants of the hall the words had been aimed at. For the rest, and most of Nargothrond, Orodreth was the stranger whose name had been interwoven with defense and war for all of Nargothrond’s existence.

“However, I feel obligated to speak of those recent events that have led us to this moment, this Feast of Remembrance.” He paused, eyes flickering, but pressing on. “It was my pleasure to hold the fortress of Minas Tirith for my Lord King Finrod and in defense of these great lands for many years. I had purposed to hold the line for one-hundred years, and then the next hundred and the next and the next. Never surrendering an inch to Morgoth.” He took a shaky breath, and the hall was silent. The serpentine figure of loss spilled through the shadows and curled itself about their throats. “You know I failed in that hope, for that is why we are here. But despite my failure, despite the grief and tears we now suffer, I would not have any say our soldiers did not fight valiantly and with the utmost honor.” 

He spread his arm out to Curufin and Celegorm and their captains seated around them. “There,” Orodreth’s voice rang out, “there sit many brave warriors, without whom many of us would not be sitting here today! Without the aid of Lords Curufin and Celegorm and their people, Tol Sirion’s loss would have come sooner, and been graver. Let them be honored!” He lifted his glass to them. “I will be the first to admit I held my forgiveness and acceptance tight against my chest and would not give it. Not at first. But the Fëanorions have proven their worth over and again to me. They are true of heart and loyal comrades in war. Let no word be spoken to disparage their character and courage upon the battlefield! Hail the Fëanorions! Hail these heroes!”

“Hail!” The hall echoed, raising their glasses to toast the Fëanorions. Though many were slow to bring their goblets to their mouths, for while Orodreth claimed to put aside the Ship Burning and the Helcaraxë, others were not so quick to forgive.

While outwardly Curufin accepted the acclaim like a prince, his eyes were stitched to Orodreth’s face. Orodreth was an impulsive, self-effacing, dullard to act thus. He’d just forfeited his own position in Nargothrond’s political web with his admittance of failure and weaknesses, and raised the Fëanorions into the place of prestige. 

Yet Curufin found he could not laugh at him. He tilted his head in acknowledgment when Orodreth looked back. The honorable fool.

The tables were cleared away and shoved against the walls to make room for a Singer’s Circle. While Elves mulled around and the first musicians lined up to begin the long procession of laments, Curufin maneuvered himself to Finrod’s side.

Finrod tilted his lips in greeting. Curufin could capture only the edge of that brilliant smile. “I wished to thank you, Cousin,” Finrod’s voice was condensed moonlight, “though I know I have expressed my gratitude before, it seems paltry next to Orodreth’s honoring of you and your people.”

“Your thanks is noted.” His mouth curled, and he enjoyed the flash of exasperation in Finrod’s eyes at his lazy sarcasm. 

“Curufin.” The word was sharp, just the way Curufin liked them from Finrod, so much cleaner and purer than Finrod’s perfect, manicured control. Finrod’s hand clasped his forearm. It felt hot even though the fabric of his tunic. “It was more than I can ever repay. You came in Nargothrond’s hour of need, and have been a valuable addition to her populace ever since. I shall be grieved to see you go.” Finrod struggled to maintain the façade of benevolent, appreciative king. But failed. Each one of the half-strangled words were honey under Curufin’s tongue.

“And here I thought, just last night, you were telling me we would be unbearable to live with now we have returned smug heroes.” Curufin looked back at Finrod through his lashes, a sly slice of smile on his lips.

Finrod huffed, dropping Curufin’s arm. Curufin’s sternum felt tight. “Not as unbearable as if you had returned conquering heroes.” The words were light, yet they stabbed Curufin, a reminder of his failure. He had conquered nothing, nor set one foot behind Angband’s iron gates. Maedhros had gotten closer to the Silmarils in his captivity than Curufin ever had.

To cover the poverty of his true accomplishments, Curufin snagged the wine glass out of Finrod’s hand and took a sip, watching Finrod over the rim as Finrod pretended offence. A harpist began to play, and Curufin surrender the glass. The number of singers grew, one gloomy song after another, more than a few dedicated to The One, and Curufin kept sharing Finrod’s wine. He touched his lips to the place Finrod’s had lingered, and passed it back like a kiss.

Curufin ignored the envious, accusing eyes watching him monopolize the king’s attention. He was a prince and answerable to no one but the last lawful High King –Maedhros. After a time though, Finrod was begged into picking up a harp and taking the circle’s center. He was a fusion of all three Elven kindred’s, and had studied music in Alqualondë under the Teleri’s most renowned artists. He was undeniable the most accomplished musician in the room.

Curufin found Orodreth standing alone, nursing a glass of wine like a wound, and keeping an eye on his daughter as Finduilas took green steps upon the political arena. The girl had the open-face of the young and naïve; she would be eaten alive. 

Curufin leaned his shoulder against a marble column, and studied Orodreth like a new species of animal. Orodreth was dressed plainly by the measure of Nargothrond’s court in a simple tunic with the embroidered gold and green snakes of Finarfin’s House on the hems. His hair and eyes were light brown. It was as if they struggled towards gold, but only when the sun poured into them could they achieve that luster. His hair had been braided against the side of his neck to hang down his chest in three braids twisted together. But the hair unraveled as it constantly had in Minas Tirith, pulling free to form little curls around Orodreth’s face and neck that lent him the perpetual air of youth. It was easy to forget Orodreth was old enough to remember Valinor when he possessed a child’s unruly hair and honest face. 

Orodreth turned to look back down the line of one deceptively slender shoulder at Curufin. He smiled with that authenticity of nature Curufin was beginning to identify as his. “Have you come to read my heart, Cousin?” Orodreth’s eyes crinkled. Curufin did not feel mocked.

“Perhaps,” he stepped away from the pillar, endless legs stalking Orodreth. “Or perhaps I already know all your secrets.”

“I do not think so,” Orodreth shrugged. “I think I surprised you today with my little speech. But come, I hate games, tell me plainly what you are about.”

Curufin tisked, “Where is the fun in that?”

Orodreth laughed softly, the amusement a pale, fleeting thing. “You know I despise you, don’t you?”

Curufin frowned, swinging around to stand with his left shoulder nearly touching Orodreth’s right. “I would not have thought it of you, _Cousin_ , to lie about such a thing to all the court. Where is that honor you spoke of now?”

“But I did not lie,” Orodreth tiled his head, having to look up a few inches. “I would not be any sort of man to steal glory not my due. Indeed, what I did in Minas Tirith’s defense was nothing but my duty and no hero’s deeds, merely a general protecting his men. I do not like you, Curufin, but you and yours have proven your worth as comrades-in-arms, and for that I would have you honored. But off the field, I think you no more my friend than you I.”

Curufin let Orodreth go when he turned away. He watched him for a long while, collecting data. Orodreth was so unassuming, so modest, yet Curufin had witnessed with his own eyes how bravely (grudgingly acknowledged) Orodreth fought. 

Curufin observed as Orodreth’s thoughts wandered their own paths, dipping deep and dark like the sunless caverns in a mountain, until someone engaged Orodreth in conversation. Then Orodreth would turn all praise effortlessly aside and onto this or that captain. Orodreth claimed he was no hero, but when the time had come to risk all, Orodreth had taken up the challenge like a soldier whose head could not be turned nor enlarged no matter how grand the triumph or acclaim. 

By the end of Curufin’s examination, he concluded that Orodreth would have been an interesting opponent in the game had he set his mind to it like he did a battle. But Orodreth had such an inherit distaste for politics, Curufin could rest easy knowing Orodreth would never challenge him on this playing field. And thus, despite some previously hidden strengths, Orodreth was a fool, for he bowed out of power. This was the power that would save your life, your family’s lives, when the sword became the weapon of a clumsy brut in your hands and its draw would sentence you to death when the wielding of your tongue would have won you protection.

*

The five boats were cradled in Finrod’s hands like pearls, and like pearls they would soon be returned to the sea. He’d carved the hulls from yew and stitched the delicate white sails with strips of a tunic he’d brought out of Valinor and carried across the Ice. It was no longer wearable, but he’d kept it for memory. He’d worn it on Angrod’s wedding day. Now it would be used to sail Angrod, Aegnor, Gelmir, Fingolfin, and Nessy’s Soul Boats.

The sun was bowing to kiss the earth in the west. The sky burned. White flags lined up like trees upon the bank, and the shore was adorned with cut fir boughs. Silent columns of white-dressed Elves surrounded Finrod, all marching to the breast of the riverbank. 

The River Narog was freezing about his calves, and his toes sunk deep in the muddy bottom as he walked out from the shore. Chucks of ice bumped into his legs, the first signs of spring’s coming. A Lighter approached, a lit fire-stick in her hands, her white dress swirling about her knees and a crown of twisted cedar sprigs in her hair. She lit his five boats solemnly, resting her stick against the wads of oil-drenched cloth in their hulls.

He set them free, one at a time, saying the name of his dead with each release so the boat would aim true. “Aegnor,” his voice broke on the last name. 

They set their boats aflame, and then freed them so the dead would see the light and know their way home. Hundreds of flaming boats bobbed down the river. The Elves would linger on the riverbank until the sun’s return, holding vigil all through the night as they gave witnessed to the boats rushing down from upstream as all of Nargothrond mourned. 

It was a Sinda woman who stood upon a peak in the riverbank to speak the sacred words of the Soul Seeking ceremony. It was a Sindarin Rite of the Dead the Noldor had adopted and altered as they had other Sindar’s traditions. Unlike so many other ceremonies, this one was not saturated with religion. Its purity had hallowed it.

At its root, the ceremony was originally a Rite of the Falas Elves that the Sindar had embraced before the sun’s first rising. Like the Noldor, the Sindar too had altered it according to their culture. Thus the emphasis on women, who were the religious leaders in Sindarin society.

Finrod watched the burning boats, his ankles submerged in the freezing water, craving the anchor of its bite. A child clutching a lovingly, but flimsily, made boat passed him and whispered the name of his father alongside his mother as they loosed their boats. It was customary for a mourner to craft their own wooden boat. Finley wrought ones sailed beside children’s crude designs christened with tears for the fathers who would never ride back out of the North.

The Sinda woman raised her arms and spread them to the sun’s last gasp. “We sail our ships to salute the stars from which we once sailed out of, and the land upon whose fat we thrive, and the sea that holds our hearts in her deep crevasses. Let the ships run now, swiftly, after our lost dead, and lead them home.”

She began a wordless hum in the back of her throat, and all gathered took up the noise until their voices reached towards the slowly sharpening stars. Finrod closed his eyes. His face shook.

A hand touched his shoulder. He opened his soul and felt Gwindor’s beside him. He turned and looked into Gwindor’s eyes and saw a deeper reflection of the anguish yanking his innards up through his throat and stiffening the air in his lungs.

Gwindor’s voice crested in the tide of wordless song. And then he spoke when Finrod believed him incapable of speech. “Gelmir thought this the most beautiful of our Rites. He told me: Gwindor, if I fall before you, promise me by the time the starlight wanes and the sun rises, you will choose life. He used to say he could not bear it if I ever stopped loving life.” He smiled, and while it was edged in sorrow, it was a promise of a life after grief’s crush had eased.

Finrod touched the smile on Gwindor’s lips, hand shaking. “You are a good brother, a good son, Gwindor.”

He was revealed by Gwindor’s words. He’d worried if one of Guilin’s sons should die before the other, the one left behind would live on but it would be the limping life of a cripple. He did not see that fate in Gwindor’s face. “How?” He asked for Gwindor’s secret. _How can you hold on to hope when all around you stand Elves bowed down under grief?_

Gwindor traced the curve of the sun’s decent. “It is a choice.” His ocean-sand hair caught the sun’s last rays and the star’s silver in a mesh of light. “Since Gelmir did not come back from that raid three months ago, I have woken up every morning with my chest crushed in. And then I make the conscious decision to get out of bed and live on. Right now it is just surviving when every breath hurts, but it will not be like this always. One day I will be able to honor Gelmir’s wish and instead of choosing to breathe, I will make the choice to live each day in joy and laughter as I once did.”

Finrod looked away, back out to the fleet of fire-boats sailing by. He understood Gwindor’s words. In this moment his bones hurt from the power of his grief, but life was too precious to squander in bitterness, forgetting how to live. In this Finrod and Gwindor were very much alike.

“I know you do not agree with my beliefs,” Gwindor continued, “but I do have faith in The One’s Great Song, though it be unfathomable to us. One day I will meet Gelmir again, no Vala can prevent this, no Dark God, no span of time. It is for that eventual reunion which I hope and live on.”

“I believe this as well,” Finrod said softly. If he did not cling to the belief of Elven soul’s re-birth, then how would any of them ever get out of bed in the morning? He would lay himself down and embrace death one day, he thought, if his Estel was stolen from him.

“Gwindor!” Guilin called his son from the shore. His leggings were rolled up, his feet white as winter and just as long. His hands were empty. He must have already cast his boats. 

Bainar was a silent tower at his shoulder, her dark hair casting shadows on her face. Gwindor turned away with a lingering squeeze of Finrod’s shoulder, before joining his parents in their shared mourning. Finrod watched the three of them walk away like an unbreakable circle, their hands reaching to link together. Guilin’s prowling body took the middle, with Bainar’s calloused hand clenched about his, while Gwindor locked hands with his father on the other side.

Finrod found Orodreth and Finduilas further downstream, their boats long loosed. Finduilas’ wet dress clung high up her legs, and from the way she shivered, the white fabric could have been an arctic blanket of ice. Orodreth had his arm about her, her head buried in his collarbone. He looked up at Finrod’s approach. There were circles under his eyes, blossoming like dark flowers. 

The traditional week of bereavement had passed between the Feast of Remembrance and the Ship Seeking ceremony. The days were printed into Orodreth’s face, and the weary droop of his shoulders spoke of a week waking to the cold place in the bed beside him where once his wife had lain.

“There are some blankets by the wine skins,” Finrod touched the wealth of Finduilas’ golden hair. It shone pale and ghostly in the moonlight. She turned her face, and Finrod saw it was not only the cold that was shaking her skeleton. 

She wiped her cheeks. “Thank you, Uncle.” Finrod heard her sniff as she walked away.

Orodreth clasped his empty hands behind his back. Shadows gathered in his eye sockets and the creases of his mouth, but the lines of his cheeks and jaw were painted silver. There was something brutal in the lighting; the flesh of his usually kind, heart-shaped face looked stretched and raw. “My daughter’s pain is more than I can bear,” Orodreth confessed to the river and its endless lines of burning boats.

Finrod bowed his head. The sorrow leaking off Orodreth was so potent it infringed on the spiritual, and a stone lodged in Finrod’s throat as his spirit touched the bleeding edges of Orodreth’s. 

“It is my fault. If I had just insisted she go south with Finduilas…If I had been a better husband, a better protector, a better general—”

Finrod’s hands leapt up to take Orodreth’s face in their cups, “You did everything you could. It was I who failed you, if anyone is to carry blame. But let us not take upon ourselves what belongs at Morgoth’s feet.” He rubbed a thumb over the soft curve of Orodreth’s cheek. “You were the best of husbands. You let Nessy make her own choices, freely. She knew the dangers of staying. She chose to marry the general and live beside him in a fortress far from the comforts her birth could have afforded her. She chose not to be parted from you, knowing what could happen. Do not take away the right of her choice now. She would not thank you for assuming blame for what _she_ chose.”

Orodreth knocked his hands away. “You make it sound so pretty, but in the end she is dead. I would go back and _force_ her to leave me so that I could have her here, with me, in this moment. I would force her against her will if it meant I did not have to hear my daughter crying herself to sleep every night!”

Orodreth pulled away, but Finrod flung out his hands, gaining purchase on Orodreth’s sleeve, and anchoring Orodreth against escape. “You _must_ release yourself from this guilt, or I fear it will destroy you, Orodreth!”

Orodreth lifted his gaze slowly to Finrod’s, his tilted face allowed the white light of the night to catch in his eyes. The brown was bleached grey, and it seemed almost that Finrod looked into a stranger’s face. 

“Are you so arrogant,” Finrod shook Orodreth, his words fashioned to slap reason into Orodreth, “that you would pocket the guilt of actions not your own? Do you think yourself a god that you can controlled the actions of others and earn the responsibility of their deaths?”

Orodreth laughed. It sounded like he choked on glass. “You are good at this, Felagund. Cruel, but effective. Yet even if the guilt of Nessy’s death is not mine, that does not change the fact that she is gone. Forever.”

“You will see her again—”

“Don’t!” Orodreth voice cracked against Finrod’s back like a slap. “Not now.” He pulled Finrod’s fingers off his sleeve, slowly, calmly, and Finrod him go. “Not now when I feel like nothing so much as a dead bird. There are ants piling bits of me on their backs, their pinchers digging deep, down to the bone, and carrying me off.” His voice broke apart in the air. Then, a deep, shaking breath: “When the sun is up, I can breathe. But when it sinks, I am a corpse again.” 

Orodreth gave his back, and Finrod watched the slender figure walk away, his own words as useless as a scrap of old rag to wipe away the layers of regret and sorrow Orodreth drowned under. Orodreth’s naked feet sunk into the sand and gravel of the bank, and his long braid swung like the cord of a mourning bell behind him.


	66. Chapter 53

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 53

“So…” Orodreth turned the Khazâd spy-glass over in his hands. “They use this devise to enhance their eye-sight?”

“Hmm,” Finrod took a quick sip of his tea. “That is what I am told. And see here,” he set his cup down on the low table. He plucked the spy-glass out of Orodreth’s hands, and displayed the way the devise collapsed in on itself, compressing into a small cube. Portability was one of the Khazâd’s trademarks. “Ingenious, is not it?”

“Huh,” Orodreth took a bite out of his scone, chewing thoughtfully before voicing the thoughts on his face. “But what is the use of it? For Elves, I mean. I can understand Dwarves and Edain, but why do you have it? I do not see where it would help in the war, or even a simple hunting trip.”

Finrod sighed, setting the spy-glass aside. “There is no practical use. Just scientific.” He did not try to explain the beauty of the craftsmanship, the glory of discovering all the tinny details of the devise, sketching them out, and seeing if they could be replicated by Noldorin craftsman. Orodreth wasn’t interested. If the spy-glass had no practical use, then he didn’t care to waste time leaning more. Finrod wanted to take it apart and understand _how_ it worked; Orodreth was only concerned with its usefulness.

“Celegorm is requesting increased patrols on the border.” ‘The border’ was the only one that counted: the Northern one. 

Orodreth’s face transformed into animation with the topic switch. Anything regarding the war interested him. “You gave your approval, did you not?” 

Finrod nodded. “But it troubles me. We already have so many soldiers stationed permanently along the Northern fences, and there is such a shadow in those lands…”

“Celegorm can be trusted not to send superfluous requests. If he says we need more soldiers in the North, then we do.” Orodreth argued with that steady sense of his that cut right through Finrod’s concerns for the mental ramifications of the Shadow. “Shorten the rotation time. Have the soldiers up there no longer than two months. It will be an inconvenience to organize so many rotations, but the war must be our first priority.” Orodreth took a slow sip of his tea, and then: “I am thinking of returning.”

Finrod set his tea cup down carefully. “It has been three years since Tol Sirion fell. You know we could use your experience out there. But Orodreth,” he locked gazes with his nephew, “are you sure? Finduilas might need you here, and you know how I rely upon you for exactly these sorts of decisions. I am no war leader, Orodreth.”

Orodreth fiddled with the handle of his cup. “Finduilas will be fine. She is doing well, and I have hope that Gwindor will ask to court her once she comes of age.” Orodreth looked out to the balcony under which a hall of Nargothrond spread in all its glory. A thousand lamps clustered like stars on the hall’s ceiling, lighting Orodreth’s chambers like a moon-shower.

“Are you sure that is for the best?” 

Before Nessellui’s death, Orodreth held the reigns of his authority over Finduilas’ life loosely, but they had tightened since. For all that he would never force a marriage upon his daughter against her will. But Finduilas was dutiful and so young. She loved her father dearly, wanting only to make him happy. Finrod feared she’d allow herself to be betrothed to Gwindor without love if it was what Orodreth hinted at wanting. 

“Gwindor cares for her,” Orodreth said stubbornly, never mind that Gwindor had shown no hint of feeling more than an elder brother’s affections for Finduilas –as was only right given her age. “He is a strong warrior with a level-head. He will make her happy and keep her safe. I know she will come to love him.”

Finrod let it go. Gwindor’s feeling may develop into the romantic, they may not, and Finduilas may never feeling anything of the kind for him. Despite being only a few years short of her majority, Finrod wondered if any man had caught her eye in _that way_. In some ways she was almost childlike, yet in others her eyes had seen more horrors than women three times her age. 

Finrod turned the conversation back to war: “So you are set then, on going North?”

“If you will release me from my duties here, yes. I feel it is where I belong. I will hold the fences alongside our men.”

Finrod traced his lips with a fingertip. “I will give you my leave, if you promise to hold yourself to the same standards as the regular soldiers. Two months, and I want you back here. Those lands are too dark to linger overlong.” Orodreth opened his mouth as if to protest, but Finrod pressed, “Celegorm rotates out just like all the other captains. Rank does not make one infallible to Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s Shadow.”

Orodreth’s mouth twisted in a smile of forfeit. “Very well, two months.”

Finrod pushed the tea tray away and gathered up his notes and the abandoned spy-glass. “You know I could not do this without you, don’t you?”

Orodreth huffed a laugh, “You would manage well enough, as you always have, Uncle. I do not add so much to your councils as all that.”

Finrod smiled at his nephew’s perpetual modesty. “Things are changing in Nargothrond. They have been changing since the Fëanorions arrived, and your own people’s coming only hastens it.” Finrod studied the collapsed spy-glass in his hand. “A balance that was long lacking has been restored. I believe it is a combination of the Fëanorions’ atheism and your people’s mellower, hardier belief in The One.”

Orodreth snorted. “I would not call the Fëanorions atheists. Rather, they believe in no gods but the Silmarils, and if they worship anything it is their lords’ Oath.” It was not lightly said. To invoke the naming of either Oath or Silmarils was to stir a sleeping monster.

“Perhaps,” Finrod said, “but can you not see the changes?”

“If by changes you mean do I see a revival of Noldorin culture, of a more militant-minded society, then yes, I have seen changes. But more than this?” Orodreth shrugged. “I am not one to hold my finger to the subtle shifting of public option.”

Finrod’s mouth compressed. “It is not so subtle a shifting of attitude. The religious radicals no longer press as hard as they once did in council. I am no longer besieged in a nest of vipers as I once felt. It is…relieving.”

“Do not put so much trust in this supposed change. The ones who made you feel cornered are still out there, lurking now, bidding their time. But while their power has been distilled with the addition of more bodies and voices, that does not make them fangless.”

“You should have more faith.”

“And you should have less.” Orodreth retreated from the small greeting area back to his desk. “If you are not careful, your trust in the inherent goodness of people is going to come back to hurt you in the end.”

Finrod took his leave, brushing off the dour warning. Orodreth was just one of those people who could not see the good in another if it was buried too deeply beneath the surface. He wanted others to act like himself: honest and simple in manner. And when they did not, he could not see that they could still be good men, just complicated ones. 

*

Celebrimbor worked on wiping the soot off his palms as he reached his chamber door. He’d have to call for a bath before joining his father and uncle as guests at Finrod’s private table. The Fëanorions –Curufin—received an invitation to dine with the king most every night now.

He pushed open the door and froze. Curufin sat in front of the lit room-heater. Celebrimbor saw a flash of silver, like a star had been stolen from the sky and dropped into Curufin’s palm. Then Curufin’s eyes darted up to his, and the bottled light was tucked safety under his tunic again. 

Celebrimbor said nothing as he closed the door behind him and walked to join his father. He knew Curufin carried the star-glass with him always, pressed like a fire against his breast. Celebrimbor’s ribs closed tight over his heart. He didn’t care that Curufin hid the light of his creation from him, hording it like a precious treasure, it was enough to know Curufin still looked into the star-glass and found some measure of comfort in its fire. 

When Celebrimbor settled in the chair across from Curufin, he found his father studying his face. There was something fragile nestled in the corners, something edging towards peace. Celebrimbor ached from the bones out.

Curufin by-passed the issue of Celebrimbor’s appearance entirely, something he rarely failed to point out the imperfections of, and said: “I thought I would see how you were getting on.”

Celebrimbor blinked. It was such an inane thing. Curufin sought out his son when he wanted something, or when he couldn’t admit he was lonely or suffering a fit of nostalgia and so made up legitimate excuses for why he required Celebrimbor’s presence. Curufin didn’t come asking how Celebrimbor was ‘getting on.’

“I…well enough,” Celebrimbor stumbled, shifting his frown to his hands. He wished he’d taken the time to wash them at the forge.

“Are you working on something? At the forge?” Curufin shifted in his chair, hand coming up to fiddle with the shape of the star-glass under his tunic.

Celebrimbor’s lips parted. He stared at his father, at his eyes, the sleek wings of his hair, the blade of his nose. He watched his father’s hands as they toyed with the bottled light of a Silmaril; he could see the strength of them in the wrists. “Yes, I have…there have been several projects I have been working on since we—” Lost our home, came to Nargothrond, what? _There have been a hundred since we last spoke like this_ , he didn’t say. He let the silence speak for him.

“I thought to join you one of these days, at the forge. It has been some time since I began a work.” _Centuries since we worked shoulder-to-shoulder with Fëanor’s fire beside us._

“Why?” Celebrimbor couldn’t help the tightness of the word. He could not bear the hope clawing its way into his chest.

Curufin flicked his gaze back at him. There was something significant about the bones of his face, as if they’d been amplified by the spirit ridding beneath them. “I am...I feel…” But because Curufin could never reveal the heart of him with words as that would be too terrifying, he evaded. “I find I have more leisure time in Nargothrond than I was afforded in Aglon. I dislike wasted time, so I thought to make use of it.” And then, defensiveness cloaked in haughtier: “Unless of course you think yourself grown beyond my instruction?”

Celebrimbor licked his lips. “No. I would like that.” His hand crept up to the token he worn about his neck, touching the braided band of his first ring.

The tightness loosed its grasp on Curufin’s muscles, and he uncrossed his legs and sat forward, dispelling the aloof, elegant pose to get closer to his son. Celebrimbor couldn’t stop himself from leaning forward in return. “Is it a work of beauty?” There was no censure in Curufin’s voice for once when he spoke of Celebrimbor’s preferred creations.

“Yes, a bracelet.” Celebrimbor’s fingers unwound their hold on each other. “It has a Khazâd inspiration in the clasp and the thickness of the band,” he encircled his wrist, showing Curufin the considerable size of the piece. 

“Khazâd?” Curufin smiled, and Celebrimbor thought the birds trapped in his chest would burst out and tear him into a hundred little pieces of joy. “What alloy?”

“Just gold,” Celebrimbor said. His father’s face lost some of its interest. Celebrimbor plowed on determinedly, forcing himself not to care. “The band is not solid,” he traced curving lines over his skin, showing the way the gold would swirl delicately.

“Gemstones?”

“Diamonds. Small ones interspersed in the loops.” He had not the words for his vision, but he did have a sketch with him as he always did when he worked on a project. He pulled it out now, handing it over to Curufin. He was thankful he’d taken the time to do a painting of the bracket below the sketch. It was the vibrancy of the coloring that had first spun itself in his mind.

Curufin traced a finger over the painting. “It is fair work.” But he just had to ask, “Have you been experimenting with any new alloys?”

Celebrimbor took the sketch back, pocketed it, and forced down the disappointment. He embraced what he’d been given. “Do you recall I had been working with the steel and mithril alloy the Khazâd invented?”

Curufin learned closer again. “That was some years ago. What have you found?”

Celebrimbor contented himself with the attention he could receive, and began explaining the different ways the alloy folded and refined. They fell into a discussion like the ones they had in the old days, in Valinor. It was a bitter-sweet hour in Celebrimbor’s mouth, for he feared it wouldn’t last, this heart-aching glimpse of his true father, the one whose hands were birds in flight, and voice erratic with passion as they bounced from idea to idea in a staccato of flow only two minds so wholly attuned to the secrets of metallurgy could comprehend. 

It was like nothing had changed. Only everything had changed. And when the conversation wound down there was no easy silence, no sure knowledge that tomorrow they would rise and join each other in the forge with the promise of Fëanor already ahead of them.

The words’ absence grew strained, like a singer over-reaching to finish his phrase. But then Curufin said, words dropped into the echoing cavern of Celebrimbor’s loneliness, with his fingers playing on the star-glass again as if seeking out comfort: “I would like to study this alloy with you. I will come down to the forges tomorrow, after the morning council meeting.” A glance flicked up at Celebrimbor’s face, then sliding away, “If that is…acceptable to you.”

His father’s face wore tension like bracing for a blow, like bracing for rejection. Celebrimbor swallowed, and said through the thickness in his throat, “Yes, I would like that.”

Curufin nodded sharply, eyes still fluttering off Celebrimbor’s, but the tautness had eased from his face. After a moment of tapping a finger on the cloth-covered glass, Curufin said, “You are a man full-grown now,” he pointed out as if he’d only now just realized a fact everyone else had known for centuries. “It occurs to me that I was some years younger than yourself when I wed and got myself a son.”

“Yes, Father, that is so,” Celebrimbor agreed slowly, cautiously.

“If you should name a lady you wish to marry, I will give my consent.” The muscles in Celebrimbor’s jaw bunched. Why did Curufin have to spoil this moment with his high-handed ways? “One of our own people would be best,” he continued plotting out Celebrimbor’s future. “They understand loyalty, and will not try to seduce you from our mission.”

Celebrimbor fenced his teeth against the words pressing like wild horses against them. “I have designs upon no lady.”

When Curufin answered it was with unaccustomed patience with Celebrimbor’s failing, yet again, to meet his father’s standards, “You need not love her. Indeed, I only shared friendship your mother. The desire for children is no doubt the deeper, as it was for me. It need only be a woman you find tolerable.”

Celebrimbor shook his head, not trusting himself to speak.

Curufin laced his fingers. “While she is not ideal, there is a political advantage to pursuing Orodreth’s daughter. In a few short years she will reach her majority, and be an acceptable age for betrothal. And while she appears devoted to her father, it may be a simple task to earn her loyalty.”

“Everyone knows Orodreth wishes Gwindor for Finduilas’ husband.” Celebrimbor hoped to silence the idea. His belly writhed like a pit of vipers. In his father’s world there was no right or wrong, only power and loyalty.

Curufin waved the objection away. “Any fool can see he has not won her heart. They are not promised. Yes, the more I think on it the better the match appeals to me. It would be a prudent move to unite our House with Finrod’s in marriage.”

“I thought you did not like Orodreth,” Celebrimbor tried to avert the collision course at the conversation’s inevitable conclusion.

“Whether I like him is inconsequential to his position as Finrod’s high-general and heir.” Curufin caught Celebrimbor in his scrutinizing gaze, “Since you claim no other attachment, what is your objection?”

Celebrimbor swallowed thickly, but his belly unclenched when his father consulted him again. Curufin would not force this upon him. A match struck in the dark, but it was quickly blown out with the harsh wind of the truth sitting on his lips. Could he say it? “I…” A Fëanorion was never a coward. “I will not end up like Mother and you.”

A pause. The words grew thorns and turned back to sink themselves into his face, his eyes, his wrists. 

“I see.” The words were stripped to their naked bones.

Celebrimbor could not let them go down into the cold earth without more. “Father, I just…I want to marry for love.”

Curufin confused him by asking, “Are you sure that is all this is?”

“What do you mean?”

“Love,” Curufin twisted the word on his lips. “I never took you for the sentimental type.” 

Celebrimbor fisted his hands at the scorn in his father’s voice. He might have burst out of his seat in that moment, with those words (that dismissal); he might have paced to the door with his back a cold answer to his father’s mockery. But he forced himself to hold onto the truths he knew, he _knew_ , were the foundation of Curufin: Curufin mocked, Curufin denied, Curufin concealed, but Curufin did not believe the lies spilling out of his own mouth. Curufin loved as Grandfather had loved: he wrote the names of his loved ones on the insides of his arms and carried them with him always. 

“Then what do you think I meant to say?” Celebrimbor turned away the doubts like a turned blade. He couldn’t afford to give them purchase.

“That you do not find the female form pleasing,” Curufin said, leaning back in his chair. “Not one woman has ever turned your head. And after you returned from Gondolin there was not one sentence you spoke for months that did not end in Maeglin.” 

Celebrimbor jerked his head. All the thoughts swam about, knocking against the sides of his skull. But, like a veil torn aside: Maeglin’s dark eyes lifting to his, framed in thick, black lashes. The curves of Maeglin’s bones, the shape of his hands, the way he’d fit inside Celebrimbor’s arms when they embraced. Maeglin’s mouth close enough to kiss; its shape drawing Celebrimbor’s gaze again and again. How many hours at he spent studying its shape without even realizing this was desire coiled hot and wanting in his belly to taste it? How often had the stay thought of how handsome Maeglin was passed through Celebrimbor’s mind? And yet Celebrimbor had not connected the thought with lust. 

His eyes had hardly snagged on another face with desire in his life. His lover had always been his work. But even if he had noticed the knife slice of five years and nothing but absence to give on the other side of that severance would have held him back. It wouldn’t have been fair to Maeglin. Celebrimbor had to go home to his family, and Maeglin would never abandon his people. They were two bodies destined to part.

“No?” Curufin raised a disbelieving brow. “Maedhros does not, you know,” he dropped lazily into the conversation. Yes, Celebrimbor had worked that out for himself centuries ago. “He thought it a great secret of his, but I knew –we all knew—in Valinor. You were young then, and he hides it much better now. In fact, there is little to hide after Angband.” 

Curufin had always been one of the few Celebrimbor had ever heard allude to Maedhros’ imprisonment plainly, without dancing about the edges of that horror. With anything else, Celebrimbor would have taken it as a cruel mockery on Curufin’s part. But Maedhros had proven himself stronger than any other Elf when he’d gotten up from his sickbed, his hand lost, his body and soul scarred, and picked up his sword and shown the world what it meant to be of Fëanor’s blood.

“Well, it is for the best,” Curufin decided. “As you say we wish to marry for love, you would not have been able to do so if you desired a man for spouse. As for Orodreth’s daughter, perhaps that is for the best too. Politically, it would have been a sound match, but she could have drawn you away from our mission. That must come before any other ties, you understand this?”

Celebrimbor nodded as was required. And did he not believe his father’s words, at least in part? The mission he cared nothing for, it was not his Oath and the Silmarils were not worth damnation over, but did not his loyalty and duty to his family come first, even before his own happiness and ambitions? Yes, his heart answered. Always.


	67. Chapter 54

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 54

The sun blazed like passion. The Narog was a lazy ribbon of silver, its water low this late in the summer, and the shores long. The sand pressed against Finrod’s soles, cool and damp, as he watched Curufin pull off his tunic and throw it carelessly atop a boulder. The action spoke louder than the crooked smile Curufin turned towards him. He’d rarely witnessed Curufin so relaxed. It smoothed out the doubt Finrod had been suffering since he’d impulsively agreed to accompany Curufin today.

Finrod tugged off his tunic and undershirt to stand bare-chested in the sun. His fingers wove through his hair, loosening the braids. He turned back to watch Curufin scoop his multitude of dark braids up and bind them with a simple thong. The sunlight shone through Curufin’s white undershirt, and the breeze played with its voluminousness. It highlighted the strong outline of his body, and Finrod found himself watching the bones in Curufin’s wrists as he pulled the baggy shirt off. 

Curufin stood, as picturesque as a statue. He turned back to Finrod with an audacious smirk. “Where is that race you promised to beat me in, Felagund?”

Finrod laughed, exultation tickling his ribs. The amusement took him off-guard. He felt many things in Curufin’s presence, but lightness was not usually among them. It had been too long since he’d experienced something as freeing as a simple swimming race. “Anytime, Cousin!” He loped over to the water’s edge beside Curufin. “What do you say, first one to the far bank and back?”

“That is not even a fourth of the distance we pulled in Alqualondë,” Curufin scorned.

And there it came again. He felt tight, wild; he felt on the brink of losing all control and punching Curufin in the face as he’d fantasized of doing on more than one occasion during their strange, tilted friendship.

He couldn’t reign in the triumph in his voice when he answered: “No, but then you never did beat me. Perhaps you will fare better in a sprint.” 

Curufin narrowed his eyes. Elation heated Finrod’s skin. He’d hit a nerve. 

“The Fëanorions did not have the leisure for lying about like seals,” Curufin lifted a haughty brow. Curufin’s eyes looked lighter out here in the sun. In the caves, they looked like the dark grey of thunderclouds in poor lighting, but now Finrod was reminded they were the pale grey of first light.

“Enough excuses!” He tossed his loosened hair, and gathered it in his hands to pull back in a hasty braid that would be easier to unravel when wet than the more complicated ones.

Finrod’s fingers snagged on another’s. He crooked his neck to see Curufin had moved behind him. “Let me,” the request was strangely soft.

Finrod released his hair with a shrug, “If you like.” The casual words camouflaged the warmth sparked by the request. Finrod read it as a sign of deepening trust and friendship. Hair braiding was something kin often shared. Unusual as their relationship was, Curufin must value him at least a little. 

Finrod waited patiently as Curufin took an overlong time with such a simple braid. Yet Curufin’s fingers felt soothing combing through his hair, so he didn’t complain. When Curufin finished, he laid the weight of the braid on Finrod’s back, but instead of drawing away, he touched, with just a single finger, the soft hairs on the back of Finrod’s neck, tracing them down to the first knob of his spine. 

Finrod turned, expecting to find a smirk on Curufin’s face and one of his smart remarks dropping off his tongue. But instead Curufin was smiling. Only, his lips were curved up in a smile too close, too intimate to be given to _him_. And then Curufin crossed the short distance between their mouths and kissed him.

Finrod almost cried out in the shock of it. He should have known, should have realized—

Curufin’s lips were soft. They tasted like candlelight. Finrod thought flames might start pouring out of his mouth. There was tension curling inside Finrod, lighting a fire in his abdomen, hot and unnervingly close to panic. 

Finrod stepped back. Stepped away. He held up his hand between them as if to ward Curufin off. He shook his head, “I do not—why did you?” 

Curufin took a confident step forward. He reached up a hand and it crawled through Finrod’s hair. “I want you,” he said simply, and tried to kiss Finrod again. 

Finrod turned his face away. “No.” 

There was one moment, no longer than a drumbeat, where Finrod saw Curufin’s face split open like he’d taken an axe to it. Curufin stared at him as if Finrod had ripped out his heart and smeared it all over his face. Finrod’s mouth went dry. He wanted to speak, wanted to cut his own throat from sheer abhorrence that _he_ could have hurt Curufin so deeply.

But he couldn’t speak, because the only words to fix this would have been acceptance, and Finrod had never thought of Curufin before this moment as a sexual being. Curufin had been beautiful, but untouchable, like a figurine hidden away behind glass. He wasn’t something Finrod ever expected to have his hands on. Curufin was hard and sharp and as unreachable as a Silmaril. They could be friends in their own way, but Finrod had never thought to desire anything more.

He floundered, and Curufin closed down, closed him out before his eyes. And then, because Curufin was still Curufin despite this unfurled desire: “Ah, I see. Good enough to shed our blood to protect your pathetic little kingdom, but Valar forbid you had to touch our dirty, Kinslaying, hides. Hmm, Felagund?”

“No!” Finrod’s tongue tangled with the thousand other things he should say to defuse this disaster.

Curufin’s smile revealed cruelty. 

There was something piteous and beautiful about Curufin as he walked away, his pride bundled to his chest, nursing its injury. There was something magnetic, forcing the eye, refusing to release it from those proud shoulders, the demanding stride of that walk, but it was a sick kind of magnetism, like eyes transfixed by a wall caving-in. 

Curufin’s figure leaving him seemed very far away. Finrod felt like a sliver of the untethered moon, disassociated from the moment. His mind was stuck on the picture of Curufin’s heart-blood dripping down his cheeks, his elfin chin, slipping into the open wound of his mouth. 

A part of him already regretted it, wondering what could have been. There was still fire burning every inch of the road between his stomach and his lips. Their mouths had touched for a breath, a blinking moment in a millennia in which he wondered if his lips would ever feel that warm again. But the rest of him knew what not even their short friendship had forgotten: there was a cancer waiting to stir in Curufin’s blood and rot him to the core. One day, the Oath would come for Curufin.

*

Finrod’s skin was soft as rainwater under his finger, and he wanted to press his mouth there, right there where the spine’s road began. He wanted to have Finrod writhing under his hands, all that pristine control torn open like a backbone, with Finrod begging for him, and only him.

He reached out to touch his mouth to sunlight, and Finrod turned his away. His mouth was not for Curufin’s.

Curufin snapped off the memory like shattering bone. Finrod would regret this day. Curufin would march himself across Finrod’s face (until he was all Finrod saw). He would pull the breath from Finrod’s lungs, steal it for his own (until Finrod knew what it was to suffocate without him). He would crack the ribs in Finrod’s chest (until Finrod knew the pain of a punctured heart). 

Fingers of self-hate stuffed themselves down his throat. He felt used up and thrown out like bile. Unwanted and unlovable. He’d forgotten not to love anything that could reject him. He’d transformed into a pathetic, needy creature his father would have despised. He’d practically _begged_ a son of Finarfin to love him. 

Glass-dust had gotten into his eyes. He needed his brother to wash (the unforgivable burn of tears) away.

Celegorm was in their chambers. Father had not completely abandoned him if he would offer this small mercy. Curufin did not know what he would have done if Celegorm was stationed at the fences. 

Celegorm rolled over from his belly-sprawl on the rug next to Huan when Curufin entered. He’d been writing a letter, no doubt some orders to the troops, but he quickly set it aside when he saw Curufin. Curufin didn’t want to know what his face looked like to warrant such quick action. 

His brother was on his feet, reaching out to him. But Curufin did not allow himself the comfort of Celegorm’s arms. That would have been too much. He was not so weak. Now that he had gained his brother’s presence, he turned away and forced himself to walk calmly over to the side table where they kept the wine. He picked up a pitcher before hesitating, “Do we have anymore of that Edain whiskey the twins sent us?”

He kept his back to Celegorm, not quite ready to face those green eyes. “Yes,” Celegorm finally answered. Curufin heard him walk over to his desk, the sound of a drawer opening, and then Celegorm’s return. His brother stood at his elbow. Curufin watched him out of the corner of his eye as Celegorm poured them both a drink.

“Now what should we toast to?” Celegorm handed him the glass. Their fingers brushed, but that was all the physical comfort Curufin would allow himself for his own folly.

“To vengeance.” Curufin tipped the glass back and gulped the whiskey down his throat where it slid a path of burning gold to his belly. He thought about the twins and all the ways they’d described the taste of whiskey back when they were the only ones crazy enough to experiment with strange brews.

They never did get it quite right. It wasn’t the taste of sex or fire or the perfect kill. It tasted like the divine end of control. It tasted like plunging off a mountain side. It tasted like the moment your body cracked open, and you welcomed it; you wanted to hurt in the dark. You wanted to forget the man you struggled and struggled and struggled to be, but weren’t and never could be. You were the man everyone hated ( _he_ hated-feared-sickened); the one never wanted, never loved, never good enough. You were the failure, and this liquid in your mouth was letting you forget that: just for a little while.

*

“To vengeance,” Celegorm whispered and drank. Something like cancer built in his veins as he looked at his little brother’s face. 

He looked into Curufin’s eyes, all the way into the back of them, and then through them, into the desolation in which Curufin dwelt. In there, in those sunless chasms of his soul, Celegorm could see black things growing, and he knew them; they were familiar because he’d felt them in his own soul. 

This was a moment he would remember all his life. This was the moment Celegorm Fëanorion knew he hated Finrod Felagund. This was the moment he swore his own private vow to make Finrod pay. 

*

“How many infantry?” Curufin’s hand poised over the scroll, ready to jot down the answer.

Himrandir flipped through his notes while Celegorm sat with his boots up on the desk, playing with one of Huan’s toy balls. “2, 350, or around that number,” Himrandir read off.

“2, 363,” Celegorm recited from memory, letting the ball fly before catching it lazily.

“And that is all three Tiers?” Curufin clarified.

“Yes,” Himrandir answered, rolling his scroll. “With the cavalry, that gives us a third of Nargothrond’s army. We would have more, but all Orodreth’s soldiers have stayed firmly in his camp.”

“Still, that would leave Nargothrond crippled,” Curufin said.

Celegorm tossed his ball again. “We _think_ they will follow us, but when it come down to it, how many are actually willing to leave their lives here, their families behind? Himlad is a long march.”

“There is no way of knowing,” Curufin dipped his quill into its ink pot. “Not until we make our final move.”

“Would it not just be easier to usurp Finrod’s throne,” Himrandir questioned his lords, one of the few able to do so.

“We have no desire to remain stuck here, ruling this Western kingdom when our brothers are in the East,” Curufin answered. “Regardless, a third of the army is only a small percentage of Nargothrond’s total populace. Unless we wish to rule by fear, then I cannot see that course as holding much success. Better to take what loyalties we can, both replenishing our numbers and diminishing Finrod’s, and return home.”

“Even a few more thousand will be a great boon against Morgoth,” Celegorm said.

“Well then,” Himrandir passed his scrolls over to Celegorm for safe-keeping –these were not the sort they could risk falling into the wrong hands. “I advise focusing our attention on the hearts of those close to our present supporters. If we can turn their loyalty, the soldiers would be easier to uproot if their families followed them.”

“It is already begun.” Curufin sealed off his scrolls and tucked them into a locked box forged with Fëanorion steel and magic that no hand but a Fëanorion’s would ever open. “Arthelion has been as busy as you these last months, collecting loyalties, favors, and secrets. Already our spy network has tripled, and rumors turn to our favor. The ground is being tilled. Soon now we can plant the seed.” 

“The sooner we act and get home the better,” Celegorm snapped his wrist and set the ball into violent movement. “I am sick to death of this place. It has been four years since Tol Sirion fell. It is time we were home.”

“No.” Curufin cautioned. “We must not act prematurely or we will lose all. Leave it to Arthelion and me to call the moment of action. These things take time. The kind of loyalty that will not turn aside at the first hardship is not bought in a day. Think of the quality of people Father chose to follow him. We cannot afford to be so picky, we need the soldiers, but we will not be sloppy. No spies will slip through our ranks, no yellow-bellied cowards who will flee in the middle of battle and endanger better men. We must demand the best, or we will only gather the riff-raff.” He took an elated breath, “And when we leave these caves, we will know we left Finrod the poorer and his kingdom the meaner, deprived of the choices bits of meat and left with the fat.”

Himrandir took his leave, clasping forearms with Celegorm, and nodding formally to Curufin. Curufin bent his face over his work with the steady slap of the ball hitting Celegorm’s palm in his ear. 

“What about the smiths?” Celegorm asked. “Might Celebrimbor be able to nurture a few more followers?”

Curufin’s quill paused. “I do not want to involve Celebrimbor in this. He is not one for politics, and I would rather he concentrated on his work, on…being content, until the time of leaving comes. Perhaps he will not have to consciously foster loyalty, and some of the smiths will follow him when we leave.” Curufin dipped his quill, acquiring only the precise amount of ink he desired. “Either way, the Nargothrond smiths are in every way inferior to Fëanorion ones. But for the extra sword-arms, they will not be greatly missed.”

Curufin only penned a few more lines before there was the familiar rap-te-tap-tap on his door. He called an enter and Arthelion swept in with a slender Sinda woman behind her. Curufin set down his quill, and Celegorm dropped his boots on the floor with a thunk, before pushing himself to his feet. Celegorm did not wait for an introduction before excusing himself. This was spies’ business, and Celegorm did not inquire on the names or motivations of Curufin’s spies.

“Sit,” Curufin pointed to the vacated seat before his desk. Arthelion settled with the deadly grace of a hunting cat. The woman followed her lead. 

The woman favored the Teleri more than the Northern Sindar tribes which had intermarried so closely with the Wood-elves. Here in the south it was the Falas and Doriath from which Nargothrond’s native populace had once sprung before migrating into wider lands. 

The woman’s hair was sleek and black, her nose flat and round, her cheekbones softly curved, and her thin-lidded apricot eyes wide. She folded her hands in her lap and met Curufin’s eyes squarely. Good.

“This is Rístang who hails from the Lisgardh Province, but has lived most of her life in Nargothrond where she was educated,” Arthelion began without a hint of smugness, but Curufin could see she savored some tidbit of information for the last. Here it came: “She went to school with the king’s son, and was bosom friends with him for years.”

Curufin steepled his fingers and examined the woman. “And now? Are you still friends with Prince Gildor, Rístang of Lisgardh?” 

“Yes,” her voice trembled, but not by much. “Though we are not as close as we once were.”

Curufin approved of her answer. It was to the point, and didn’t sugarcoat her lack of current intimacy with excuses. “Are you willing to renew your friendship with the prince?”

Rístang licked her lips, hands clenching, the knuckles protruding. “That depends.” 

Curufin was disappointed. So she was one of those wheezing ignoramus who would sell their own mother for a price. But then she renewed his faith in her. She raised her chin and stared boldly back, proving she was not one of those who sweated rank terror, or the toads who hid behind their purse strings. “Arthelion says Gildor will not be hurt. She has promised me that Gildor will be hurt because of information I provide you. I want your word of the same. My lord.” A beat too late, and that made Curufin smile.

“You have it.” He did not want anyone hurt, not physically. And the ties were only around Gildor anyway. Not a difficult promise. His vengeance would not touch a hair on the boy’s head. This was between Finrod and him.

Rístang gave him a stiff nod. “Then I will do it. I will spy for you.” 

He was pleased Rístang could admit to exactly what she was jumping into. It was not honorable. He could read her like he’d read the motivations of so many other spies. She would be one of the ones he could respect. Her ambition and her oblique loyalty to her friend he could appreciate.

In her face, the way she held her body, the very bones of her skeleton, he learned her motivation and it was not the greed of a lord who already had enough and hungered like an avaricious scavenger for more. It was the desperation of those who had been born with hunger in their bellies and grown up with rags about their twig-thin skeletons. It was the desperation of those who knew with intimacy the black, hopeless despair of poverty, and swore never to fall into its net again. 

Rístang wanted so much more than her place in the world, and Curufin saw nothing wrong with her using her intelligence to achieve it. It wasn’t ‘honest work’ that was pulling her into higher waters, but it was her own cunning and guile.

Curufin watched the woman leave, and knew he’d collected yet another piece in the game. He’d been amassing his power quietly, trending on soft feet. He’d upset no hornets nests, toppled no public figures; he’d not even spoken another cold word to Finrod since That Day. He’d looked Finrod in the eye at council meeting and meals, and pretended his neck didn’t burn with humiliation every time Finrod gave him a glance too close to pity. He may have all but begged Finrod to love him, but he was not a broken creature to be _pitied_.


	68. Chapter 55

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Underage character (15 y/o) kissed by an adult (non-con on account of being underage).

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 55

Curufin watched Finrod. He watched his hands as Finrod complemented the blushing Finduilas on her acceptance of Gwindor’s courtship (Finrod had kind hands). He watched his neck as he turned to speak to Gwindor. He watched his smile, that treasure never bestowed on _him_ , as Finrod gave it away like cheap wine to every one of the lords and ladies (undeserving, all of them) flitting into the shadow of Finrod’s sun-bright brilliance.

Curufin’s heart howled in his chest. His love had been an ember in his palm, warming his frozen hands. Now they were cold and empty, and his love lay like a dirty coal discarded in the snow at his feet. 

Sometimes he hated Finrod. Hated him enough to dream of the vengeance he’d reap from Finrod’s flesh (his heart was a snarling beast in a cage). But he never hated Finrod as much as he hated himself. Sometimes he loved Finrod, loved him so much he trembled from the sparks crawling under his skin, setting him ablaze.

Love, hate, it didn’t matter. His wretched, broken, pitiable heart didn’t matter. He’d let himself be sidetracked by beauty, by the hope of something he’d long ago forfeited in place of a higher-calling. The only thing that matter was Fëanor. The only desires worth noting were his father’s last wishes. 

He would strip Finrod of his army, and it would be sweet. He wanted to march out of Nargothrond and know what he left behind was not worth the dust on his heels (do you see my back walking away, Finrod?). But his revenge was but a succulent layer in the tower of his mission. The main goal was the army he’d march back into Himlad. Because his vengeance against Finrod was nothing compared to his vengeance against Morgoth.

He could have taken Finrod to his knees; he’d only needed to choose a more personal route to revenge. But it was enough that Finrod loved his kingdom. He saw himself as his people’s protector. Curufin was the snake in their ears, stealing their love from Finrod –and Finrod did love to be loved.

Curufin tore his eyes off Finrod. He took a sip of wine, cool, lethal, and elegant to outside eyes. He’d draped his hair with diamonds, amethysts, and onyx, and slipped rings on his fingers. He wore a silver belt on his waist, and a tunic of black velvet edged in silver stars. It had been a long time since he put on such an elaborate show, but he was very careful now to always look the part of Fëanor’s son. 

He’d received an invitation to Gwindor and Finduilas’ courtship feast as a common courtesy, just as all the court had; it was not a mark of friendship on their part. With hundreds in attendance, he’d not been expected to speak with the new courters after his initial coagulations and Gift-Giving. 

Standing here, in the heart of Finrod’s realm surrounded by the trappings of decadence, one could forget for a moment that Nargothrond’s borders were infested with Orcs, and raids came ever deeper into the lush fields of the Northern providences. But it was only for the length of a night. The weight of the war had settled her bulk over the once fat, sheltered Nargothrondrims. Nargothrond’s people and army had re-learned what the North had never forgotten: what it felt like to be constantly on-edge, sending company after company to the front-lines, and losing a few more every time. It was a creeping rise of black tide that wore them down, hunched their resiliency, and seeded bitterness. They grew soul-weary from the relentless weight on their shoulders and the claws of anxiety and fear about their necks.

Curufin spared them no pity.

Elves spun before him in dance. Women with the faces of honey roses, their skirts swirling about them like fans, and men in flowing robes of Sindarin and Telerin influence and traditional Noldorin dress as well. There was a youth dancing there, his head still a few inches short of the man he partnered with. Young, but old enough to teeter over the edge of propriety had he dared dance with another male in Tirion. But this was not Tirion, and the cultures of Endor’s native populace had sunk deep enough into Nargothrond’s bones to allow a quiet dalliance on the side, so long as it was not flaunted before the noses of the more traditional.

The youth was instantly recognizable. That shade of hair was not common. It flew behind him like a wrath of pearls, and into it had been strung sapphires, enhancing the blue of his eyes. 

The youth spun, a smile almost as beautiful as his father’s on his lips. The lamp light slid across the planes of his face, pooling in the corners of his mouth, running like a women’s liner around the length of his eyes. They were the exact shape and shade of his father’s.

Curufin had considered it, for the glimmer of a moment when he was at his most hateful, before the clamp of focus had slipped over his vengeance and reined its destruction in. How could he stab deeper into Finrod’s heart but through the spear-head of his son? Would jealousy have spawned in Finrod as it would have in Curufin to see another man usurping the place of father in his son’s heart? But stealing the boy’s affections would not serve the ultimate goal.

And yet, Curufin had never been able to look at Finrod’s son without seeing Finrod’s lips pressed into the boy’s temple, his mouth rounding with the words ‘I love you.’ It was everything Curufin loved and envied in Finrod: the courage to boldly, bravely (so beautifully) tell the ones dear to him of their place in his heart. The words choked in Curufin’s throat, and Curufinwë’s eyes had never looked as peaceful as Gildor’s when Finrod smiled like Gildor was his everything. 

Curufin cornered the youth at the drink table. It was lined with crystal wine pitchers, and he watched as Gildor quenched his thirst. There was a line of sweat like sea-spray on his temples.

Gildor looked up at him over the line of the goblet he chugged from. He dropped his hand, and a smear of red was left like berry juice on his upper lip. There was something unexpected in the way the youth looked up at him. It seemed almost like rapture, like hope. Curufin rolled it over in his head, picking it apart. He decided the youth must still be nursing a spark of hero worship. 

“I see you are enjoying yourself, young prince,” Curufin picked up one of the wine glasses and took a languid sip.

Gildor’s lips parted. Then, too quickly, “Yes!” A flush rode his cheeks. “Yes, very well, Lord Curufin.”

“Come now,” Curufin smiled perfectly (they could not see the blood on his tongue behind the line of ice). “I remember you used to call me cousin not so long ago.”

A bold look walked into the youth’s eyes and he said: “I will call you cousin, but only if you call me Gildor.”

“Ah, you drive a hard bargain.” The way Gildor looked at him, as if Curufin held the stars in his face, reminded Curufin of how Gildor used to trail after him some years ago. Curufin was not accustomed to being looked at like that. A thrill curled his belly, but its warmth was nothing to the blaze such a look from Curufinwë would have lit.

“You dance very well,” he paused to watch Gildor come alight like a lit lamp at the praise; he was so very easy to read. “So much enthusiasm warrants a respite. I was going up to the surface just now. Join me.” 

Gildor put down his glass at once and followed Curufin. They passed out of the Great Hall and through the Tower Doors to step out into the starlight. Curufin led Gildor over to a raised spot on the High Wall where they could look down on the river gorge winding below.

“So,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning his hip against the wall, “have you begun your sword lessons?”

Gildor smiled, strangely unself-conscious in Curufin’s sole presence. Curufin was used to intimidating people, but apart from the continued flush of Gildor’s cheeks, he appeared perfectly at ease. “Yes, Gwindor started teaching me some years ago.”

Gildor hoisted himself up on the wall, his face and knees pointed towards Curufin. The moon hung directly behind him now, and it caught in his hair and tangled silver into the sleek white and palest gold. 

“And do you still want to be a hero?” Curufin asked with a hint of mockery.

Gildor shed his smile, and suddenly appeared to Curufin like some ethereal creature crawled out of the night sky. His eyes were shadowed, but Curufin felt their gaze on his face. When Gildor spoke his voice was soft but full of passion, “I am going to save people. I am going to swallow all the pain I see in the ones I love. I don’t know how, only that, if I could do anything, be anything, it would be this.”

“You set yourself an impossible task. Not everyone can be saved, and you cannot erase the memory of the past.”

“But you?” Gildor leaned towards Curufin, fingers anchoring him to the wall as he stretched out his neck like a swan. “Can you be saved, my lord?”

It seemed that time held still, and the world hushed, holding its breath. Or maybe it was only that Curufin could hear nothing through the wind whistling passed his ears as he fell, a long drop into the dark pit at his feet from whence crawled a snake. Once, the snake had possessed but one head –a fanged mouth bared to sink into the boy’s heart and usurp Finrod’s place—but it morphed now into a two-headed beast. There was another way to steal the boy’s affections. One even the shadows grown long in Curufin’s mind had not whispered to him of until he raced towards vengeance, falling too far from the light. 

Curufin raised his hand and touched the creature spun from moonlight. Gildor’s hair slid like star-dust through his fingers. He touched the curve of that neck, fingertips printing themselves all over the honey-brown skin. He dropped his hands to the youth’s knees and spread them. They opened willingly, and he slipped in like a serpent. 

“No,” he whispered into the air of Gildor’s sharp inhale, “I am far passed saving.”

He recited something in his mind as he closed the distance between their mouths (Gildor never once tried to turn away). It sounded logical, or at least justifiable, and gave him the excuse to press his mouth against that petal-shaped one. He ignored something else that tasted like shame. 

His tongue slid the silky road of sin into that sweet, yielding mouth. And Gildor drank up all his gathered misery, all his vindictive, gnawing hunger. Lying in the bed of Gildor’s mouth, he wondered if the youth’s strange ambitions were not, in fact, possible. 

Curufin closed his eyes and felt like he possessed the one he wanted most. His hands cupped the Gildor’s neck, and it seemed in that moment that he was touching a small piece of Finrod. He touched Gildor’s bones and flesh that was made of Finrod’s seed; he pressed his mouth into the corners of Gildor’s lips which were exactly like Finrod’s corners and wore a smile so very like the brilliant one he thirsted for.

Gildor moaned into his mouth, arching up against him. And the boy sighed _oh_ ; he sighed _oh!_

Curufin’s mouth was abruptly empty. He’d torn his body away from Gildor’s. Gildor’s knees were still spread, and his mouth bruised by Curufin’s. Slowly Gildor brought one hand up to touch his mouth, a mouth that was no longer his own. A mouth that knew what it was to be kissed.

( _Oh!_ ) That sound. It had been too surprised, too wondrous, too _young_. It hadn’t sounded like Finrod at all. Curufin suddenly wanted the boy away from him.

A voice came from behind, “I would like a moment with my brother. Alone.” Curufin’s vertebra grew stone.

He watched Gildor slip off the wall, a painful awkwardness in the movements, the darting glance at Curufin, that that body had not known before. The unsureness of a child led into the domain of an adult. 

Curufin turned, pressed his hips against the wall, and crossed his legs as casually unaffected as if he’d been out for a stroll in the moonlight. Celegorm watched him from the shadows. Curufin lifted his chin back. 

Gildor smiled at him, as if there was something to smile about (but the edges were lost, floundering along the lines of an unknown script). “All right,” Gildor started to leave, casting one last look over his shoulder at Curufin. The boy did not look away, did not move on, and Curufin knew he searched for a word of promise, of encouragement, of guidance (How was this supposed to go? those too-young eyes asked.).

Curufin couldn’t look into the boy’s face. His tongue wanted to lash out, drive the boy far, far away from him, but he bit it until he tasted blood and nodded in Gildor’s direction because he didn’t know how to go back and erase what he’d done; didn’t know how to erase himself. The youth’s smile stretched so wide it was a wonder it didn’t consume his entire face. There came the soft drops of Gildor’s feet as he walked away, and Curufin felt like he’d swallowed leeches.

The shadows clung to Celegorm as he left them, as if he were a lover reluctantly parted. But finally he came into the light, and Curufin could see his brother’s face clearly. Fury crawled in its bones.

Curufin balanced a mask of annoyance on his face. “Can I not have a moment’s entertainment?” 

Celegorm’s hand shot out and latched around Curufin’s bicep, fingers digging in like fish hooks. “ _Entertainment_?” If the word had been a blade, cold steel would be pressed against Curufin’s throat.

Curufin twisted away. “It is not like I mean to fuck the boy.” His lip curled in scorn, but behind the veneer he was caught in an explosion. There was a solar system falling in his head. He was out of control. 

Celegorm struck him. Curufin’s head snapped back with the blow, and he might have toppled over the High Wall and into empty space beyond if Celegorm had not fisted a hand in his tunic, dragging him forward to fling down on the stones. Curufin hissed, shooting out his legs, kicking into the soft place behind Celegorm’s knees to bring him down with him. 

Celegorm grunted and rolled to catch Curufin about the upper legs, trying to pin them. But Curufin’s shoulders had the strength to throw him off. Curufin punched Celegorm’s face, felt the flesh split under his knuckles, and grinned like a wild animal let loose.

They wrestled for long moments before Curufin had Celegorm’s hands pinned above his head and straddled his waist. Celegorm’s chest heaved under him, and Curufin’s panting breaths struck the places on Celegorm’s cheeks already darkening in a bruise. 

Celegorm’s eyes glinted, “Feeling better?”

His brother always knew. Celegorm had seen what he needed and delivered it. 

Curufin rolled off Celegorm and brushed down his clothes. Diamonds, amethyst, and onyx were scattered upon the stones, lying next to the pearls and moonstones Celegorm had woven through his own hair. 

Celegorm picked up a pearl. He held it cupped in the hollow of his hand, studying its luminescent luster in the moonlight. “There is revenge, and then there is revenge. Finrod will pay, but that is a child. I will not allow you to touch a child in _that way_.”

Curufin set his chin. It didn’t matter that under the mask of haughtier he knew Celegorm was right; he wasn’t accustomed to admitting mistakes. “Have you forgotten why we are still here, in this miserable little kingdom? Have you forgotten what Father died for?” 

Celegorm’s temper unrolled. “This has _nothing_ to do with Father or the Oath! It is about your inability to release a thing once you set your mind on it! Did I not warn you _years_ ago about getting involved with Finrod? But would you listen to good-sense? No! And now look where your _obsession_ with that self-righteous, hypocritical—”

“Enough!” Curufin sliced a hand through the air as if he could slice the words out of Celegorm’s mouth. “Enough,” he said quieter, like a plea, and Celegorm’s mouth snapped shut.

They battled with their eyes. But Celegorm turned away before the contest truly began, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I should not have spoken of—”

“It matters not.”

Celegorm sighed, the sound heavy as an oath’s chains. He looked up and met Curufin’s eyes. He stared at him a long moment in which Curufin struggled not to look away. Then he said, voice soft, and all the more deadly because of it, “You will never touch that boy again. Do you understand me? You will never touch any child like that again.”

Curufin couldn’t turn around and look at himself (at the wretched thing he’d become, crawling on his belly in the dust, fallen so very, very far from the light). “What are you going to do? Kill me?” he threw out, a challenge (maybe a plea; maybe he wanted to die).

“No,” Celegorm answered, voice still smooth and low as a knife’s blade. “I will not kill you. I could never. Not anymore than you could me. But I will castrate you. I will do it for you as much as the innocents in your path, Brother.”

Curufin let out a shaky breath, eyes closing. “Good,” he said. Or meant to say, but the word never made it passed the tightness in his throat.

Silence stretched; its limbs cracked. Time bulged out between them like guts from a wound. 

“I am going to bed.” Celegorm’s hand reached out to him as Curufin turned away, wanting to hide, or vomit, or claw all his skin off. Curufin stopped, yearning for and rejecting Celegorm’s touch. The hand dropped, its fingertips brushing air. They did not touch. Celegorm walked away and Curufin’s call to wait, to came back to him, to forgive him, to _save_ him, clogged in the choke-hold of shame. He didn’t deserve forgiveness. 

There was blood on his lips, on his knuckles, and the corridors were not empty. He drew eyes and whispers. They did not matter, it did not matter, until a voice called his name, the last one he wanted finding him at this state.

There was worry in Finrod’s eyes as he positioned himself directly in Curufin’s path. “What has happened? Have you been attacked, in _Nargothrond_?” 

Curufin’s lip started to curl, but the sharp sting of a split was the best represent. “It is nothing. Celegorm was being an idiot, that is all.”

“You have taken no serious injury, you are sure?” Finrod continued to press. His perfect mouth turned down. It wasn’t one of those dazzling smiles of his (they weren’t for Curufin), but Curufin had moved that mouth. Him. It was almost like he’d touched it. 

“It is nothing,” Curufin repeated tersely. Finrod leaned close. Curufin could smell him. He knew his scent, every last layer of it. 

“As you say.” Finrod’s fingers fiddled with one of his rings, turning it over and over again. Finrod was nervous. 

(You are beautiful, beautiful)

Curufin had to get away. “I bid you goodnight.” Painfully polite. That is all he was with Finrod these days. He would never let Finrod see his pain again. He had nothing but his pride now. Nothing.

“Curufin,” Finrod snagged his sleeve as he brushed passed, those fingers inches from the curves of his wrists. He could feel their heat. 

Curufin turned his neck, just his neck, slowly to look at Finrod. They stood close enough he could see the tinny freckles dashed across the bridge of Finrod’s nose. He wanted to slip them in his pocket and carry them off. 

“May I speak with you a moment?”

Curufin wanted to deny the request, but that would be giving Finrod something more than remote politeness. “Of course. I am ever at your disposal, my lord.” He stepped back, putting distance he desperately needed between them. He clasped his hands behind his back and arched a brow of arrogance. 

Finrod smiled, just a slice of appreciation, not one born from the sun’s womb. “Curufin I…these past two years…” Finrod stumbled, licked his lips, plowed on, “A rift has grown between you and I. I shall not insult your intelligence by feigning ignorance of its root. Nor will I pretend to be blameless in its cause and persistence. In fact, I lay the blame at my own feet. After that day I feared—that is—I misjudged you. I doubted your character. I looked upon you with suspicion. I was wrong. You have proved yourself a better man than I presumed. I was no true friend to think such thoughts of you when you have done nothing but lend aid and strength to Nargothrond since your arrival. Forgive me, Cousin.” Finrod looked at Curufin as if Curufin were truly the better man he’d described.

( _Oh_ the boy sighed, _oh!_ )

Curufin could not speak through the sickness in his lungs.

Finrod’s face set, his eyes grew steel like flowers. “No. I will not play games.” Finrod crossed the barrier of distance between them to grab hold of Curufin’s shoulder. “Let me tell you, let me tell you the whole truth. Curufin,” the name broke from his lips with complexity. “I spent half our time together wanting to strangle you, but madness though it is: I miss you. Even your coldness and your caustic tongue and your mockery. If things could go back to the way they were—”

Curufin brushed off Finrod’s hand. “I am not interested in being your friend, Felagund.”

“I know.” Finrod’s voice quieted, condensed. “I know what you want. I want it too.” The words crawled down Curufin’s spine, and spread out like a spider’s web over his skin. He felt hot and wild and messy.

(Mother’s face, twisted in bitterness as she looked at him standing at Father’s side –always at Father’s side, never at hers—and she said as she walked away for the last time: _I see I leave nothing worth coming back for._ They said in Tirion after, that Nerdanel was the soft voice whispering reason in Fëanor’s ear which he ignored –to his folly. But sometimes it was the quite words, the ones whispered into your ear like a caress, which cut the deepest. Fëanor shook the house with shouts, and Nerdanel whispered ugly words when her heart hurt.)

(He would have done anything to please Father, to make him love him, but did Father? Was he ever good enough for Father? Father didn’t say, not in the end, not when Curufin needed to hear the words. Father’s lips only had room for the Oath. The Oath, the Oath, the Oath. The Oath was Father’s last thought; the Oath was what Curufin needed to fulfill to regain Father’s love, the love he’d once never doubted –before the Oath).

(Four days. Four days since his son came with the perfection of the divine into the world and Curufin could count the hours he’d held him on one hand. Everyone wanted their turn holding the baby, and he never begrudged his father or brothers their turns; it wasn’t _his_ family ever eager to snatch his son from his arms, saying Curufinwë needed his mother, he was hungry, Curufin wasn’t holding him right.

If Elweth had only given birth at Fëanor’s house her family wouldn’t be lurking around every corner with judging eyes and arms every reaching to tear Curufinwë away from him. They used to approve of him, but that was before Elweth fell out of love with him. Before his failures as a husband rooted resentment in her heart. 

He wished he never married her. No, he would marry her every day for the rest of his life if it meant Curufinwë came into the world with the perfection of the divine. But he wished…well, it didn’t matter now. She wished to be rid of him, wished she’d never laid eyes on him, wished she’d never yoked herself to a man who would never love her back the way she used to love him before all his inadequacies killed the love in her eyes and left only sores in its wake.

Curufin crept like a thief into his son’s nursery. The room was lit only by Telperion’s silver light, and Elweth’s mother had dosed off in the chair beside Curufinwë’s crib. _She’d placed herself here like a guard dog to warn him away,_ he thought bitterly. He wanted away from this house full of people who loved him not. He wanted to take Curufinwë and run home to Father. If Father knew how Elweth’s family had been treated him—but Curufin was seventeen, not a child to go running to his father because someone was mean to him. 

Curufin crept over to the crib and peered down. Curufinwë was sleeping, his little chest rising and falling, tinny mouth parted. His cheeks were chubby and begging for a kiss, his nose sweetness itself. 

Curufin reached in and scooped him up, careful not to jostle him into waking. He brought Curufinwë to his chest, and Curufinwë’s head rested in the crook of his shoulder. His son was warm and soft, and smelt like milk and new, tender buds.

Curufin’s socked feet whispered over the floorboards as he smuggled his treasure back into his rooms, or rather, Elweth’s rooms. Elweth had the bedroom and was sleeping now, snatching what rest she could between Curufinwë’s feedings. Curufin carried Curufinwë over to the couch serving as Curufin’s bed. He’d kicked the coverlet off as he tossed and turned, wishing he was home, wishing he was not such a failure, wishing Father was here, wishing he had not made Caranthir hate him, wishing he was someone else, someone more like Father.

He stepped over the coverlet, and curled up in the couch’s corner, legs crossed, Curufinwë pillowed in his lap. He traced Curufinwë’s face, its every sweet line, kissed his chubby cheeks, his tinny fingers, pulled the blanket aside so he could measure the exact softness of Curufinwë’s round belly, circle his little bellybutton, press his finger against sole’s so soft only a foot that had never known a step could achieve.

He did something wrong. Curufinwë whimpered and woke with a cry. “Shh, shh,” Curufin threw the blanket back over him and bounced his leg, but this only made Curufinwë cry all the harder. 

Curufin picked him up and fit him into the crook of his neck, but Curufinwë hated it there, squirming and knotting his tinny fingers into fists. Curufin stood and tried to bounce and rock him as Father did. Curufinwë never cried in Father’s arms. Curufinwë was screaming in Curufin’s. 

He couldn’t get him to stop screaming, and his little face had gone red as tears leaked from his eyes. His son didn’t want him. Curufin felt like crying when Elweth hurried out from her bedroom demanding to know what he’d done, and snatching Curufinwë from his arms.

Elweth did everything right and Curufinwë’s crying trickled down to sniffles. Elweth glared at Curufin, “What were you doing waking him up at this hour? Haven’t I told you not to bother him when he’s sleeping?” She shook her head at him, the perpetual disappointment. “You are so selfish.”

His hands fisted. “If your family weren’t constantly trying to steal my son from me—”

She laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. “ _My_ family is the problem? Yours are crowding in here every day making nuisances of themselves! Isn’t it enough that we will be back there in that house in a few weeks where they will hog my son all to themselves? My family only have us here for a month, but oh no, that’s too much of a sacrifice for you!” Her mouth twisted in bitterness, “Gods, I wish I never married you.”

Curufin crossed his arms over the coldness inside, and bit back, “No more than I wish I’d never married _you_.”

Her nostrils flared and chin lifted, lip pulled back to bare her teeth, “At least _I_ never pretended to be someone I wasn’t.”

“I never said I loved you.”

“It was implied and you damn well know it Curufin! Why in god’s name did you ask me to marry you if you didn’t love me back? What was the _point_ of this charade of a marriage?”

He’d wanted—what? The love once shinning in her eyes for _him_? Only not from her, not really. But he said, because to bare his heart would be to slip a knife into her hand, “I wanted a child.”

She barked a laugh. Curufinwë whined. She rubbed his back and he settled as he wouldn’t under Curufin’s touch. “You wanted a child, and you needed a womb to get one.” Bitterness dripped from every word. “So you married me to get a son you don’t even love?”

“I love Curufinwë.” Only it didn’t sound so much like it when his words could only fall out flat and dead from numb lips.

“Really? You could have fooled me. You’re shaping up to be as pathetic a father as you are a husband.”

It knifed him because it was _true_. Curufinwë didn’t even want him to _touch_ him. Curufinwë _hated_ him, like Caranthir hated—

Curufinwë wailed. Curufin hadn’t meant—but baby’s were sensitive to the _fëar_ around them, especially their parents. Curufin hadn’t meant to hurt him, never, but Curufinwë was screaming and Elweth was telling him to ‘Get out; what kind of an irresponsible father was he to lose control of himself with his newborn child _right there_?’

Curufin hadn’t meant to—he was sorry. Sorry he was such a failure. Sorry Curufinwë who had come into the world with the perfection of the divine was cursed with a father like him when he should have had Fëanor.)

“Curufin.” Finrod reached out to touch him. Curufin turned his face away. Finrod did not try to touch him again, but he was still there, so close, his mouth so bright, his eyes so full. “If I had realized, that day, your intentions—”

Curufin cut off the thoughts ruthlessly. He needed to stop Finrod before the words could pool inside his eyelids, sink like the caressing of a lover’s hip into his skeleton and shake him to pieces.

It was too late, far too late. Too late to pick up the coal icing over in the snow. Too late to trust in fairy tales. Curufin had woken up. He had remembered what he was still breathing for after the brightest sun in the universal had burned to ash in his arms. He had remembered his destiny and it wasn’t Finrod Felagund’s mouth turning into his. 

“It was a fleeting whim,” Curufin dismissed, careless, as if he wasn’t burning on a funeral pier. “The desire has long passed. Goodnight, my lord.” He turned away. 

Curufin chose Fëanor. He chose his true purpose; the only thing that would never reject him: the Oath. (Do you see Father? Do you see me? Am I worthy now?) He would give up everything, choke himself down, until only Fëanor’s desires, Fëanor’s dreams, Fëanor’s loves rode on his tongue and purified all his imperfections.

Ah, but ah! Down in the belly of himself, in the center of what was Curufin, he clutched Finrod’s warm name to his chest. 

Finrod did not call him back. They would not be having this conversation again. Curufin knew Finrod like the back of his own hand. Finrod would not seek him out now, never again. There was pride in it, that was what would snag Finrod’s feet, but what would stop Finrod from breaking the noose of pride was his security, security in himself. Finrod was loved. He didn’t live in a world of doubt; he was not trapped in a body destroying itself with hate. He did not need Curufin.

Curufin passed a boy with Finrod’s eyes as he strode (fled) to his chambers. The boy turned to him, Curufin’s name falling from his lips ( _Oh_ the boy sighed, _oh!_ ). Curufin pushed him away. He did not know what cruelty he spewed, only that he get the child away (child, child, child). Away from _him_. He had a soul like burial grounds. What he touched became unhealthy.

The boy gasped; a wet sound that smeared like angry blood over accusing white stones. Curufin felt it like a fist to his back. His hands shook like drumbeats. 

He was drowning; the waves pummeled him again and again, and drug him down down down to the ocean bottom. A coral reef waited for him like a monster’s fangs (he was the monster). The currents tossed him against the reef until his legs shredded and his wrists tattered.

Finrod’s hand (beautiful and kind) lifted him. Finrod pressed his mouth (loved, so loved) against his and became the air he breathed. Finrod whispered in his ear: “But see? You are not a monster, not yet. You walked away.”

He wanted it to be Fëanor’s voice in his ear, and Fëanor’s hot hand rescuing him. But his grief had been too all-consuming, and turned back on itself until the self-hate was woven as tightly around the memories of Fëanor as the love.

Finrod’s love was the easier reach. Curufin carried his love for Finrod like a broken rib. The pain was constant, but he could endure it; he had to. He didn’t have permission to collapse into himself and set himself on fire so he could burn to ash and blow away on the wind that would take him back home, back to his father’s arms. He had to fulfill his father’s last wish first, only then would his father welcome him back, only then would a lifetime of failures wash from his skin. Only then would he be worthy.


	69. Chapter 56

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *signifies direct quote from the Silmarillion  
> Note: I was influenced in the writing of the Nargothrond politics surrounded the quest of the Silmaril by several tumbler posts, most notably lintamande’s “What on earth happened in Nargothrond?”

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 56

Finrod stood on the throne’s dais in the Great Hall. The Nauglamír lay against his throat, and in his eyes rode grim determination. He was really doing this. Celegorm did not know whether to laugh at the sheer madness of what Finrod purposed (steal a Silmaril from Morgoth, indeed; as if the Fëanorions wouldn’t have done so centuries ago if it was a feat dependent upon strength alone), or to draw his sword and slay the Adan here and now for daring to name a Silmaril in desire.

The beggar Adan had dragged himself out of the wilds to wave a ring under their noses. Beren was a wretch who asked others to die so he could have the woman he desired. Celegorm had rarely beheld a creature so self-absorbed. Finrod had taken the Adan away for bath and board and counsel, but every one of the Elves who’d witnessed the Adan’s egocentric entrance remembered a rash oath sworn by their king. Remembered and began calculating the outcome as the heralds went out through the city, gathering as many ears and hearts to the Great Hall as they could pack in.

Now Finrod addressed a congregation of some thousand, and more stood in the corridors beyond hoping to catch their king’s words through the opened doors. The lamplight caught in the Nauglamír’s brilliance, and cast strange shadows on Finrod’s face, bathing him in jewel-light. Grim though his eyes were, they were also burning as if they would swallow the world. Finrod was really doing this.

“My people! The people of the great and noble realm of Nargothrond! I call upon you in this hour. An oath I swore has now come to fullness. I have told you of my purpose, now I ask: who among you will follow your king upon this quest?” Finrod’s voice could have coaxed lilies into blossom. It wove through psyches until skeletons vibrated with the same passion and determination as their king.

But it was not so for all. While some cried out, their hearts roused by their king’s speech, others were hesitant. Many nobles stood silent but for those utterly loyal to Finrod. More might have been swayed now, pressured by honor and accusations of cowardice, but into this teetering tide Celegorm stood, drawing his sword. It flashed bright as starlight, and netted all eyes.

His father’s star was branded into his breastbone, stitched across his tunic, but it might as well have been his skin. It burned, burned, burned. The Oath was rising in his throat like a thousand birds (a chain of fire around his neck). This was the moment Finrod Felagund would pay for hurting his little brother, and Finrod had brought it all on himself.

His soul was the pulsing beat of vengeance; corrupted, consumed. He’d given himself up to its hunger. Curufin was bleeding beside him. Not visibility, Curufin was too skilled at his games to show such weakness. But Curufin looked like he wanted to rip the Adan’s tongue out for daring to even _name_ a piece of Fëanor, much less stand around plotting how he would put his unworthy hands on something so scared, so pure, so far above him. There was a broken, sick smile on Curufin’s teeth as he stared at the Adan as if mesmerized. Celegorm had to save Curufin from himself.

Celegorm’s voice seemed to rock the ceiling, the very foundations of Nargothrond. It fed upon vengeance. It feed upon justice, for how could Finrod ask this of his people for something as insignificant as a love affair? Finrod was not Fëanor, and this was no Oath of vengeance calling him. There was no dead grandfathers feeding the flames of Barahir’s oath, only Finrod’s foolishness.

Finrod thought he could march the army _Celegorm_ had honed into a weapon to Angband? He thought he could squander what Celegorm had labored so long to build on a mass suicide? Well he thought wrong.

Celegorm spoke long and with all the passion of his soul. As he spoke, the nobles clustered in tight, selective groups, banding together with allies, sending off one of their own to flitter over to the opposition’s huddle, whispering promises and threats in each other’s ears. The corners of the Great Hall writhed like a stirred hornet’s next. 

After Celegorm, Curufin spoke, soft but potent words, and those of petty hearts and minds quailed before them. Daring and noble Finrod’s quest had seemed on the surface, but Curufin peeled back the glamour to reveal the terror within. Finrod was asking them to ride to the gates of Angband, into the very presence of the Enemy to steal one of the Great Jewels, and they were afraid. The North was darkness and death and thousands of fire-boats sailing to the sea. Had they not already suffered enough? Were they not still bleeding and dying in the war; how could Finrod ask this of them? It was all very sad, yes, the poor, love-struck boy, but they could hardly be expected to ride to war. 

Into this doubt Edrahil rose, one of Finrod’s sworn-companions and nobleborn himself. He looked with outraged disgust upon the nobles who would so lightly abandoned their sworn oaths to their king. And he rebuked them for their nattervoices, thievish smiles, and hollow hearts like magpies. But his words fell on deft ears, for the lords most loyal to Finrod were far away ruling their lands and holding the Northern front. 

Even Orodreth, Finrod’s heir and steward, sat silent. But this was not such a surprise, for Orodreth had some sense when it came to war. His face was drawn pale with shock at Finrod’s proposition.

Now the dissent grew in earnest, and voices rose in the crowd:

“Felagund is no Vala to command us!”

“How can he ask us to throw our lives away so cheaply? Are we his thralls now, that he would think us so expendable?”

From a Sinda: “He is not even our true king! Was our loyalty not sworn to Thingol before him? Should those bonds not take precedence?” 

They abandoned Finrod in factions. The Sindar were first (they were ever ready to sulk out of dangerous deeds), then the Order of the Faith, their nobles leading the dissent. The Sons of Eru came after. One by one they turned their backs on Finrod. 

Celegorm and Curufin’s speeches began it, but it was Nargothrond who finished it.

This was what happened when a ruler asked too much of a people, when a people loved their king too superficially. Oh Finrod was adored by the common people, but adoration only carried one so far when terror whispered in your ear like a lover. He was tolerated by the power-hungry vultures of the high-classes, those leeches without honor who saw Finrod as an obstacle, one they now were delivered such a golden opportunity of removing. This was an advantageous political assassination. The nobles kept their hands lily-white, didn’t they? 

Finrod lifted his hands, and abandoned though he was they quieted before him, such was the in-breed majesty of his face in that moment, and the undeniable authority of the gesture. The noisy discord lay back down, like a kitten cowed before a lion’s might. Finrod took the crown from his head and cast it at his feet. It clang, clang, clanged upon the stones; the silence in the hall was thick enough to eat. 

“Your oaths of faith to me you may break, but I must hold my bond. Yet if there be any on whom the shadow of our curse has not yet fallen, I should find at least a few to follow me, and should not go hence as a beggar that is thrust from the gates.”* 

Only ten stood.

Finrod gave the crown and stewardship of Nargothrond into Orodreth’s hands. But when the crown was passed over, Finrod did not offer a word to Orodreth or allow their fingers to brush in the giving. Orodreth did not look away from the frozen stars of Finrod’s eyes. 

When Finrod left the Great Hall it was as a king, crownless though he was. His head was not bowed, and it seemed that he was freer and greater than he had ever been with the crown of Nargothrond upon his brow. He stood tall, almost as one of the Maiar, and when he passed through the crowd they all stepped aside. As he drew close it seemed Power curled down the endings of their nerves and the scent of rain and something exotic, humid, and untamed trailed behind him.

*

He didn’t know why he’d ever expected better, but he had. Maybe Orodreth had been right: he was too eager to see the good in people. 

It wasn’t the sea of serpents he stood in that hurt the worst, it was the ones he’d known –trusted—who had sat silent. Ah, but they hadn’t all been silent, had they? A wolf flashed teeth like diamonds at him, eyes the color of pale morning light, and mouth, Finrod knew from experience, a bed of heat. ( _I miss you_ , he had said like a fool, a well-played harp in Curufin’s hands. _I miss you_ , he had said like it would mean something to Curufin.)

Well, it was done with now. The decision had been made; all that was left was saying his private goodbyes, some in-person and others only in letters for those far from here. He would entrust these to Thangear as he had entrusted his sworn-companion to watch over his son when he was gone. Thangear would have come with him, but Finrod had asked this last thing of him: guard his greatest treasure. 

It might be that Finrod returned from this quest, but the likelihood was slim. Unless Beren were to change his mind or die before they reached Angband, Finrod could not turn aside. A life-debt bound him. When Beren called upon his oath no other course would have been acceptable but to offer his own life in payment. Not a small number of Barahir’s men had died saving Finrod, how could he do any less?

He was ashamed of the envy he felt when he remembered how another Elf’s oath had been taken up by seven voices though the terms were much more terrifying and the darkness just as impenetrable. Fëanor had called upon tens of thousands to follow him, and they had. Fëanor had led them into the unknown expanses of the world, sustaining them through years of wandering the Wastes of Araman on little more than the flesh of vengeance and promised glories. 

But perhaps that was all the difference: the danger had been vague. They had not known what horrors they allowed themselves to be led into like lambs. The people of Nargothrond possessed no such ignorance.

“Finrod!” Finrod turned, forgoing his single-minded trek to the privacy of his chambers. Too much of him wanted to ignore Orodreth’s voice to allow himself that petty revenge.

“What do you want, Orodreth?” The words snapped like flint against flint, but he couldn’t help that. There was only so much betrayal he could bear.

There was nothing pleading in Orodreth’s eyes. This was a general come to confront his commanding officer on a badly made call, as Orodreth saw it. “Finrod.” Orodreth said the name like a steadying bar. And then, his feet under him, he shoved off. “I will not offer excuses for my lack of support in the hall. You are my lord and king and uncle, but _how_ could you ask this of us? Can you not see how useless this quest will be? And worse, what if it succeeds? You heard Celegorm’s words: they will honor their Oath. If the Silmaril is reclaimed, then will that not be a greater evil? Why must you insist on throwing your life away for nothing, for worse than nothing!”

Finrod bit back, all the anger he’d stuffed down in the Great Hall when even _Orodreth_ had not spoken for him, rising up like bile in his throat, “I owned a life-debt, or have you conveniently forgotten? The bonds tying me to this quest are no less unbreakable than the ones leading the Fëanorions. I will not be forsworn!”

Orodreth’s face blazed like the moon. “You have bloated the ties binding yourself to Beren. If you wanted to, you could refuse him, but because of your pride you will not!”

“Ask yourself Orodreth, would you ever be able to look me in the eyes again if I sent Beren out alone, if I cast him from my halls and chose the path of cowardice and dishonor?”

“But you would be alive!”

“At what price? I cannot do other than what I have and be who I am.”

“You are as bad as a Fëanorion! Stubborn to the point of self-destruction!”

Finrod looked away from the desperation in Orodreth’s eyes. “Uncle—” The word fell apart. 

“I must.” Finrod turned back to him, touching his nephew’s cheek. Orodreth looked so young with his fingers clenched about the crown of Nargothrond. He looked lost as a child. “I would not part from you like this. It may be that we do not meet again in this life.”

“Don’t. Please.” _Don’t leave me._

“I am sorry. Look after Gildor for me, I cannot…he will not understand, and I—” Finrod pressed shaking hands into his thighs, digging his fingernails into the flesh. The hollows between his knuckles felt empty. “Goodbye, Orodreth.” He did not allow himself to look back. The ground beneath him was tearing open.

Finrod closed the door of his chambers and permitted himself one moment’s weakness to lean back against it, head tilted, staring up at the ceiling and feeling like he was falling apart. It wasn’t the future quest that was making dry vines scratch inwards against his ribcage, it was the abandonment. He felt discarded, utterly forsaken, in a city which had once been his home. Rain pummeled his shoulders, bowing his head under its weight and coldness; it was the kind of rain that cut holes in butterfly wings.

There was a knock on the door by his ear. He knew that knock, just as poised as ever, as if nothing had been destroyed. He tensed, waiting for the knocker to push the door open as if he belonged in here with Finrod. But Curufin kept waiting on the other side. Suddenly Finrod was _furious_ that Curufin would make that concession _now_.

He yanked open the door and stared at the wolf on the other side. He did not speak. He didn’t think he could force words through the tightness of this throat.

Curufin’s face was sharp as a star, and just as pitiless. Finrod wanted to cut off that haughty nose. He wanted to rip those eyes out and be swept away in the unleashed thunderstorm. He wanted to slam Curufin against the wall and punish him with the blades of his teeth and bruise him with his lips until Curufin begged for forgiveness.

But Curufin was never going to beg, so Finrod did nothing; just stared, unsmiling, unmoving, unblinking at the one who’d turned his city against him.

For a moment Curufin allowed the battle of wills, but then he grew bored and brushed passed Finrod into the room. Finrod let him, because if he raised his hands to push Curufin away he didn’t know what else he might do.

He couldn’t stand being anywhere near Curufin, so he spun away to pace in a wild silence. Curufin watched him for so long Finrod almost arched his neck like an injured animal and snarled. But finally Curufin spoke. “I brought this for you. Celebrimbor made it. He wanted you to have it.” In Curufin’s palm lay a delicate necklace. Under white gold canopy, set into a bed of twining white-gold serpents, lay a single, perfectly cut, diamond. “It is an object of Power. The magic of the wearer’s voice is enhanced.”

Finrod did not need Curufin to tell him in that condescending way that the necklace carried Power. It was drenched in it. It dripped into the air about Curufin’s hand in silver tears. It hummed with the melody of battle-song, and laughed like Avari as they danced with death.

Finrod’s fingers itched to touch it. It was exquisite, and begged to have his hands upon it, discovering it. But he would take nothing out of Curufin’s palm. Did Curufin expect him to be grateful? 

Curufin’s fingers clenched about the necklace and he stalked to Finrod. “Don’t be a fool, Finrod.” 

Finrod’s hand opened, spread like a star, and Curufin dropped the necklace into it. He’d wanted to refuse, he’d been planning to, but then Curufin had said his name _like that_. He wanted to slap Curufin.

“You think this changes anything? You think I will forgive you now?” 

Curufin’s mouth curled, and Finrod hated, hated, hated him. “Forgive? I have done nothing to regret. No one is forcing you to follow that Mortal. This is your choice.”

Finrod still, after everything, couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You poisoned my own people against me! If not for you and your brother—”

The aloof smirk on Curufin’s lips shattered and he was suddenly inches from Finrod’s face. “You did this to yourself! What did you expect to happen? Did you actually think I would stand silent while that pet Mortal of yours defiled my father with his lustful thoughts?”

“You are mad,” Finrod shook his head, taking a step back from the unnatural light in Curufin’s eyes. “The Silmarils are not Fëanor.”

Curufin sneered. “You could not possibly understand.”

Finrod narrowed his eyes, stepping forward until he felt Curufin’s hot, ragged breaths on his cheek. Curufin was going to burn Finrod up with insanity and love like obsession in his eyes. Had any father been so loved as Fëanor? Did any deserve it less? “I don’t forgive. I won’t.”

Curufin laughed and Finrod tasted dead things in his mouth. “You think I do not know what this is really about? Did you actually think, were you truly delusional enough to believe I would choose _you_ over my own father?” 

Finrod’s head came up. “I despise you.”

“And I you.”

Finrod felt like he was drowning, only inside out. He wrapped his fingers around Curufin’s jaw, watched those lips blossom into fullness from surprise as the tight control Curufin pressed into them unraveled. Finrod shoved his mouth over Curufin’s.

It was only a moment before Curufin pushed him away, all that lushness tightening into a hard, unforgiving line. Finrod wanted to whisper into the velvet shadow of the kiss how much he hated this part of Curufin. He said, though he knew Curufin wouldn’t care, but his pride refused to swallow it: “This does not change anything.”

Not even a flash of regret stitched itself into Curufin’s skin. He slipped out of Finrod’s hands like smoke, like fire, like something intangible and ephemeral. But because Finrod would have his way this time, because Curufin would not win this round, he chased him. He reached out his hands and drew smoke and fire back, and slammed his mouth against Curufin’s. He was done playing games.

The color of fire erupted in his mouth, and smoke solidified in his arms when Curufin dug his hands like claws into Finrod’s hair. Finrod inhaled love like obsession; a love so deep and all-consuming it bordered on insanity. He’d never smelt anything so delicious, never breathed in anything he wanted more than he wanted to be the recipient of a love like that. He hated Fëanor. He envied him. He wanted a piece of what Fëanor had. 

Curufin’s hands on his back, his neck, his face, were like brands and hungry mouths; burning him, consuming him. Finrod wanted to be eaten up. He wanted to get burned just so he knew what that fire (so carefully hidden and buried beneath ice) felt like.

He pushed Curufin down on the bed, and spread himself over him. Lust walked every path of his body and thickened in his belly. Curufin growled in his ear, tearing off Finrod’s clothes. Finrod tore right back, wanting to run his hands over skin like a forge. 

He lifted his head to pull off Curufin’s tunic and stared down at Curufin’s face. It was painted with brutality. Curufin snarled something, eyes cold and cracked, and Finrod hated them. 

He cupped the bones of Curufin’s jaw, feeling the heat curl into his skin. Curufin’s cheekbones were curved like heartbeats. He kissed Curufin again, but slowly and thoroughly where the last was hast and violence. Curufin fought him, but Finrod’s tongue would not be ignored. Curufin fought until he broke to pieces in Finrod’s hands, and Finrod had never thought, never imagined…

It was Finrod who dominated Curufin and led them into bliss. His soul exulted, body shaking loose, unstitching itself until he could be re-sewn inside Curufin’s mouth. He was beyond all control, soaring passed all bonds and limitations. He was free. 

He looked down on Curufin laying beneath him, thighs wrapped about his waist. There was a look on Curufin’s face as Finrod moved inside him, forcing the pleasure sounds from behind his clenched teeth. It was a look of pure ecstasy, but more, different, darker. It was as if Curufin had lost himself somewhere inside himself, and never wanted to be found. 

There was a mess inside Finrod’s mouth. He felt like he’d crawled into Curufin’s soul. What he saw there froze all his hollows solid. He wanted to weep. He wanted to take Curufin’s head between his hands and dash it upon the stones until either Curufin ceased to exist or all the self-destruction crawled out like maggots.

They lay after, panting and sweat-soaked, but only for a moment. Finrod had collapsed atop Curufin, lips pressing into Curufin’s collarbone, nose buried in hair black as nightmares. But then Curufin pushed him off, pushed him away again and re-built himself. Finrod unsewed the pieces he’d left of himself inside Curufin’s mouth.

Curufin’s face became again a corpse in winter. Finrod wanted to hide in the folds of his mouth, tuck himself into the lines of his eyes and let the frost cling to the insides of his bones. But he did not touch Curufin when he rose from the bed and gathered his discarded clothing. 

It was over as quickly as it had begun. He’d know how this would end the moment he’d kissed that sensual, cruel mouth. In the morning, he would ride from Nargothrond’s gates with only ten loyal companions out of thousands, and one Edain who had once been his foster-son but was now his doom.

He closed the doors on Curufin’s breath, his mouth, his touch like fire, and lastly, as Curufin left without a backward glance or word, Finrod sealed off Curufin’s eyes. But there was one thing left to say, one thing tiptoeing across his tongue, birthed from self-hate and compassion. But he did not whisper it into the space between Curufin’s shoulder blades. He should, he should, he should. Just _say_ it. The moment was lost, and he was left alone on a bed as immense as the sea. 

_I forgive you._


	70. Chapter 57

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 57

Lúthien watched from underneath her cloak as they piled the Orc and wolf carcasses, and burned them. A great stench rose from the burning, and black smoke defiled the air. They spoke among themselves and she knew them to be Golodhrim, for they spoke in the language her father had forbidden from spreading into Doriath. 

_It is a virus,_ he said, _like these so called ‘High-Elves’ who would set themselves above us._ Though her father would have counseled her to flee from this place, she did not. Her father had imprisoned her. He had lain his heavy hand upon her neck and sent _her_ Beren away. He’d introduced her to something she’d only known as a shadow before he’d caged her and broken her dancing legs. He’d introduced her to fear.

She was betrayed on all sides. Her mother, her father, Daeron. She could trust no one but herself. And so, knowing nothing of the lands beyond Melian’s Girdle, she left the forest she knew every path of, every little stream, every grove of trees.

Beren was hers to save. He was the piece of herself she had long lost. He was innocence and purity. He was the goodness she lacked. And the thought of harm coming to him was unacceptable. She would not allow it.

She crouched low in the underbrush and watched the Golodhrim set up camp. Everything they did was fascinating and strange. She had met no Golodhrim but Galadriel and her brothers. As for the Orcs now stacked in burning piles, she had never set eyes upon the monsters. The Naugrim were the only foreign race allowed into Doriath, even the Wood-elves and Teleri had been shut out behind the Girdle’s fence.

Unknown as the dangers and wonders outside her mother’s Girdle were, she carried on. Fear was the companion she laid down with at night, shaking her skeleton like bitter cold. She’d hugged her cloak tighter, the only thing she’d brought from home besides herself, and wished Beren lay beside her. She got up stiff and sore every morning, wiped the dried tears away, wrapped her cloak about herself like arms, and went on. She did not have time to be crippled by fear and loneliness, not when she must rescue her treasure from Tol-in-Gaurhoth. 

The great hound she had watched hunt down the Orcs and wolves, sniffed closer. She was not immediately aware of the danger, thinking her cloak would conceal her, but the hound bounded forward and caught her cloak between its jaws. It fell from her like a waterfall of stars.

The hound peered up at her with surprisingly intelligent eyes. Lúthien presented her wrists for its perusal, and once it had sniffed her, patted its shaggy head. Animals were a familiarity in a land that had become tangled about her feet as she walked unknown paths full of unknown peoples.

“Hello, friend.” The hound rubbed its head against her scratching fingers. “Aren’t you a friendly one? Your master must spoil you.” The hound yipped, licking her fingers. She crouched down, looking into the hound’s eyes. “Could you help me, my friend? I must go to Tol-in-Gaurhoth, but I am lost. The one I love has been taken prisoner and I must fly quickly to save him. I see there, your masters have horses and maps, would you help me get one?”

The hound shook his massive head, whining in the back of his throat. “Come now,” Lúthien smiled the smile that gave her anything she desired in Doriath (or once had). “Surely they have many. They would not miss one map and one horse.”

The hound barked. Lúthien stumbled back, shushing the creature. But it kept up the noise and ran after her, pulling at her dress as she hurried to throw the cloak back over her head at the sound of approaching feet. The hound had her fast by her dress, and though she sent a pulse of sleeping magic at it, it shook the spell off with no effect. There was no time for something more powerful, for the man was upon them.

His appearance, on the surface, might have offered comfort by its familiarity to a Sinda male, but gave her none. She refused to let fear conquer her. She had not wanted to deal with the Golodhrim, but perhaps she could work this to her benefit; that was, after all, what she was best at in Doriath. 

The man’s long tail of fair hair slipped over his shoulder as he knelt by the hound. He placed his hand on the animal’s neck and looked right through her. But though he could not see her, she felt sure from the sharpness of his eyes that he knew she was there. The color of his eyes –green—reminded her of the hunting tigers she’d seen in her mother’s scrying bowls. No, they were deeper than that. They were like the stories the Wood-elves used to tell before they stopped wandering into Doriath. The man’s eyes were green like the Land’s must be. Perilous and wild. If they had been set into a woman’s face, Lúthien thought her breath might have stopped; but there was but one man who could hold her interest, and his eyes were black like the beard on his cheeks, and warm like sand under the sun.

“What have you caught, boy?” The man spoke in his hound’s ear. “Something different, I wager. Something we have not hunted before. But what is it?” 

She shifted back, and those green eyes followed the movement of the minuet shadows wreathing her. They fell upon the grass at her feet and she was shocked to see her silhouette left the faintest of shadows in the moonlight. Only a hunter of Beleg’s measure would have caught it. She had not heard the Golodhrim had such skill.

Seeing that she would not escape, she embraced her other course. Voice steady she spoke: “I am Lúthien, daughter of Elu Thingol, King of Beleriand, and Melian the Maia!” She swept the cloak from her shoulders and let it pool at her feet. She stood tall and regal with pride. Her shoulders were pulled back, slight as they were, and her neck rose like a white jewel from their joining.

He stared up at her from where he knelt in the grass. The sky dripped diamonds and haloed her shorn hair like a crown. But he was not besotted as so many poor souls in Doriath were at the sight of her. 

He tiled his head as if she really were some uncommon beast he hunted and now examined with the interest of a fresh, curious kill. “You claim to be Thingol’s daughter? Yet I find it odd to see her here, outside Doriath’s borders, when all Elven lands know Thingol’s perchance for keeping his daughter behind the Girdle.”

Lúthien’s chin rose. “My father thought to imprison me, and keep me from rescuing Beren, whom I shall wed. My mother has Seen Beren’s capture and imprisonment in Tol-in-Gaurhoth by Morgoth’s Lieutenant Gorthaur. And not only Beren, but Finrod Felagund. I have escaped my father’s nets, and go now to Tol-in-Gaurhoth. I request what aid you can give, for I see you are a lord of the Golodhrim. I have heard your people are much learned in warfare, and now one of your own princes lies imprisoned.”

The man was silent for so long Lúthien began calculating if she could slip into her cloak and elude him and his hound since it seemed he would give no aid, when finally he spoke. “If Finrod has indeed been captured, then there is no hope for him. Rescue is impossible.” He rose to his feet, towering like a Golodh, despite his lithe form. She did not care for the way he looked down upon her.

“Is this cowardice I hear from the lips of a Golodh?” she challenged. 

He smiled at her; it was not a friendly one. “And what do you know of the Noldor? Little more, I think, than the fortress you now purpose to ‘rescue’ prisoners from. Where is your sword,” he peered at her waist in exaggerated mockery, “what is this? You would go unarmed and witless into the den of the Enemy? Go home, silly girl.”

She laughed, taking him by surprise. “It is you who are witless to accuse the daughter of Melian so. It is as is rumored then: the men of the Golodhrim cannot see beyond the length of their sexes. You think me useless because I am no man,” she shook her head, laughing again. “You know nothing.”

He smiled like knives, “This from the woman whose father imprisoned her by her own admittance?”

Her nostrils flared, but she offered no excuse for her father’s behavior. There was none. She would find it hard to forgive him, if she ever did.

The Golodh leaned closer, highlighting his advantage of height when he bowed his back to meet her eyes evenly. “I said nothing of your sex as the cause of your ineptitude. That was your insecurities showing.”

Lúthien smiled prettily, transported back to Doriath’s court. He had played that one well, she acknowledged. But she was not daunted. Did this man think her so naïve she had never encountered ridicule before? He knew as little of Doriath politics as she did of Golodhrim. 

He belittled her for her lack of sword, thinking she played at being a man but doing a poor job of it. If Lúthien had wanted a sword, she would have gone to one of the Wardens and asked for one. But that would have indeed been playing at something she was not; the sword would have been useless steel in her untrained hands. There were Wood-elf women she’d known before her mother’s Girdle rose, who picked up bows and swords, and joined their males on the battlefield. She liked women like that, liked how they smelt, liked the sounds they made when they arched under her. But that was not who Lúthien was. 

“I am not going home. There is only a cage waiting for me back there, and I will not walk into it willingly. Now,” she bent to retrieve her cloak from the grass. “I would welcome your help, for I am not a silly little girl, and I realize I may need assistance on this endeavor. But if you offer me nothing, then I shall be on my way.”

She turned to leave, and his hand wrapped around her upper arm. She tensed. She did not like it there. It reminded her of her father’s grip when she turned away after he’d asked for her word not to pursue Beren. She’d not given it. And he had taken away her freedom.

The male dropped her arm when he saw she stopped, and the constriction in her chest eased. She was not safe, she knew that, had learned not to trust anyone, but he stepped back and she could breathe again. She was strangely grateful to this man who had been so disdainful, and yet given her what not even her own father had.

“Celegorm Fëanorion,” the man introduced himself. The name should have sent fear spiking through her, for here stood one of the infamous Kinslayers her father abhorred. But the way he’d said his name, the pride infused so tightly with the words not even a needlepoint could have separated him for what he was, reminded her of herself. That was how she said her name. It was the way a descended in-love with their heritage did. 

“I have a proposition for you, lady,” he said solemnly, with the space of two arms between them. She was so ridiculously grateful for a common courtesy she would have taken for granted but two months ago. “I rode north with a party of soldiers, including my brother, for we heard reports of wolves and Orcs pushing further south than is their custom. They have been dealt with. In the morning we break camp and head back to Nargothrond from which we came. Return with us. It may be that in Nargothrond, the realm Finrod Felagund ruled, you will find many willing arms to aid your quest.”

This seemed sound counsel to her. But more, now she knew the man’s identify, she was quicker to trust his intentions. For was not Finrod kin? “I will accompany you.”

He smiled. It did not feel sincere, but then, he didn’t have to like her to want his cousin safe. They could be allies. He offered his arm. She pretended not to see it and strode towards the camp. 

She felt lighter than she had since Beren had been stolen from her. He was her light, and without him all was darkness. She had not realized how dim the shadows were until his pure brilliance illuminated them.

She had a dream in Doriath, before Beren’s coming. One she’d thought a child’s fantasy. She dreamed of coming home after her dancing feet had wandered forest paths, or better yet, after she’d sat prettily smiling though council meetings where her presence was tolerated like a child’s indulgence but no one actually believed the day would arrive when the crown of Doriath passed to the head of Thingol’s daughter. 

She had a picture of coming home and tearing the pretty, perfect smile from her mouth like a second skin. There would be someone waiting for her, someone _hers_ , who wanted her just for herself. She dreamed that one day she’d find someone who would never lie to her. Someone who would never use her. (They all wanted something –to posses, to touch, to pour power into their greedy mouths.) 

She’d thought it a silly dream of youth. Then she met Beren and come _home_. He looked at her, and she knew there was not one evil bone in his body, because when he looked at her he saw _her_ like no one else had. The others saw her body, her face, this thing they wanted. She had turned inside out with love for a Man she didn’t know the name of or where he came from or how he’d gotten in such a pitiful state. None of it had mattered. All that was real in that moment was his eyes meeting her, looking into her, and his voice as he asked if she had a bit of bread to spare, for he’d not eaten in three days.

Now the purest thing on Arda was threatened, and she would do _anything_ to reach her Beren in time to save him. She’d promised Beren she’d take care of him. There in the forest she’d sworn it when he smelled of death and unwashed flesh and his eyes were haunted by nightmares. He’d smiled at her, and maybe he hadn’t quiet believed her, but she knew how far she’d go to keep that promise. Now she’d learned something of what had put those nightmares in Beren’s eyes, and realized just how remarkably precious Beren’s soul really was. 

*

She was causing problems. Curufin had been less than thrilled when Celegorm brought Lúthien back to the campfire with him, but it didn’t take his brother more than an introduction to discern why Celegorm had brought the woman. She was Elu Thingol’s precious daughter and heir.

They took her back to Nargothrond as Celegorm had promised, but that was where the promises ended. He had not, after all, actually promised to help her, only that she might, _might_ , find aid in Nargothrond. The moment they were through the Tower Doors, she had started more problems. She tried to stop and talk to Elves they passed, telling them their king was captured and wouldn’t they help her rescue him? She actually shed tears, her voice trembling like silver chimes. Celegorm might have believed the act had he not first met her when she stood tall and proud as a queen. This innocent, dove-eyed maiden she slipped into the shoes of was not her. 

He’d taken her as quickly as possible to a secluded wing of the city. They could not afford her stirring things up with her tears and stories of Finrod’s torment. She needed to be isolated until Curufin decided how best to use this game piece. 

Curufin’s thoughts had turned North since Maedhros sent word of alliances he’d consolidated. Curufin’s ultimate goal was finally approaching after so many years. The taste of success was building under their tongues. It seemed all the pieces were slipping together beneath their feet and they could not possibly stumble now, not now the backs of Curufin’s eyes burned as if they reflected the light of the Silmaril he imagined in his palms.

Celegorm shifted the food tray in his hands to knock at Lúthien’s door. He was forced to take up the role of common servant. He would trust no other with her after what happened with Himrandir. 

He’d sent his captain-general to deliver Lúthien’s evening meal last night. The return journey had taken them most of the day, and then she had been such a nuisance when she realized they weren’t going to let her wander wherever she liked and talk with whoever took her fancy. But that evening Himrandir came to his chambers. There was a stillness about him. Himrandir asked to be relieved of his duty regarding Lúthien, asked never to set eyes upon her again. Celegorm was shocked, Himrandir had never, not once, begged off a duty. But though Celegorm asked for the reason, Himrandir said unless he was ordered by his lord, he would not speak of it.

Celegorm did not order; he released Himrandir from the duty. But it was what Himrandir said, his back to Celegorm as he stood ready to leave, that decided Celegorm: _I love my wife. I would cut off my own arm before I betrayed her._

That was when Celegorm determined to investigate for himself what had occurred, though he already had a guess. As for himself, he’d looked at no woman since _she_ died. And did not expect to ever again. He’d cut out that part of himself when he’d cast her from his heart and life and memory. Erased. It had been erased, like her.

He didn’t wait for Lúthien to open the door; he was angry enough to march over every line of propriety. He found her sitting as far from the door as possible, curled into a nook directly under a sunbeam floating down from the sun-window in the ceiling. He considered it more than generous on his part that he’d found her one of the chambers close enough to the surface to boast natural light.

She uncurled her legs and rose like a swan lifting off. Her neck was long and her shoulders slender like the bones in bird wings. As he crossed the room to her, he was remained of her slightness of statue. He’d heard stories of the beauty of Thingol’s daughter, but he’d never expected to find her short as an Edain woman.

He set the tray down on the table, and let his eyes sweep over the room. He lingered on the unmade bed and the pair of discarded muddy boots by the door. He sensed her tension as he walked over to finger the nightgown she’d laid over the back of a chair. He wanted her to feel his ownership of this place, of these things. He wanted her to understand the powerlessness of her position.

“Is it not enough you took my cloak?” He turned to see her head thrown back like a cornered stag. She was beautiful, he could acknowledge that, but he wanted to wrap his hand around that bared column and squeeze until the memory of Himrandir’s voice coming as near to a confession of shameful deeds as it could bear was destroyed. 

“What did you do to him?” 

Her diaphragm expanded, and her lower jaw slid out with the breath, showing the edges of gleaming teeth. “Next time don’t send your henchmen to do your dirty work. It seems I was correct: you are a coward, _my lord_.”

His hand fisted in the white fabric of the nightgown, and threw it from him. “What. Did. You. Do.”

She strode forward when he expected her to retreat from the lash of his temper. Serene as a cat, she picked up the nightgown where it lay in the floor dust. “I will thank you not to throw my things about. Who knows, after all, if I shall be afforded something as basic as a bath again?”

He wanted to say they were _his_ things, but that was disgustingly petty. He forced himself to take a deep breath, counting in his head backwards from twenty as his father taught him to do as a child to help him stop hitting things when he got angry. When he reached the end, he felt marginally collected, until he found her watching him. “Maybe you would have a bath,” he stabbed, “if you had not treated the one I entrusted with your needs like an expendable toy!”

Her teeth flashed and he had the sharp impression she wanted to bite him. “Well maybe if you had not _imprisoned_ me and sent _jailers_ to bring my meals like a pet, I would not have!”

“I have done nothing your own father did not,” he hit back. “Do you not think he will be so very grateful to the sons of Fëanor for keeping his daughter from running off and getting herself killed?”

“You have no right to cage me here!”

“Eat your breakfast,” he slid the tray across the table. “We would not want you wasting away, would we?” He spun around, heading for the door, boots snapping against the stone slabs. “I will have a bath brought in if you can restrain yourself from assaulting anymore of my people. I have heard caged birds enjoy baths, but I suppose you would know.” The door slammed shut on her infuriated cry.

He sent servants with the bath, but didn’t trust them to have prolonged contact with the Sinda princess. He’d yet to find a solution for the ‘Lúthien problem’ when the noon hour came, and so found himself once again outside her door with a meal tray. This could not become a habit. He had neither the time nor patience.

He stopped and forced himself to knock this time. After a long moment, her voice called out for him to enter and he shoved the door open and marched in. It was the scent that slammed into him first, even before the vision of her, there, naked in the tub. The heady scent of sex flooded the room, slithering like serpentine musk into his belly, saturating his mind. She is the most beautiful thing he’d ever beheld; how had he not realized it before? He was burning for the danger smirking at him from her dark eyes.

Her voice was a deep purple that vibrated under his skin, “How kind of you to bring my meal, my lord.” She rose from the bath and the water slipped down a body more perfect than even Aredhel’s. She picked up her shift and pulled it on. It clung to her curves like lust.

She walked to him as if on a path of moonlight; her feet so delicate they must have by-passed the floor entirely, for surely no floor was worthy of her feet’s caress. When she stopped before him, he thought he would break apart from want.

“Eat with me, my lord,” she said, taking his hand in hers. Her skin wrapped about him like a ribbon of night. He’d never loved anything so much as he loved her. “Mmm, fresh peaches. You found my one weakness.” She picked up one of the peach slices and slid it on her tongue.

Her voice curled starlight into the long-shadows in his mind, hooking about them, feeding off their darkness to swell like a rising chorus until all he could see was her, and all he wanted was to lay his hands on her lavender skin and lick up her scent as he sunk into her body. The world had not known beauty until she stepped upon its breast.

He was enchanted, netted, overwhelmed, bloated. He was dizzily in love with her. His thoughts splashed around inside his skull. Her teeth closed over the pink flesh of a peach. She followed the juice’s trail down her fingers with her tongue.

“Lúthien.” Her name was a prayer, a plea. He reached out to measure the height of her cheekbones with his fingers. She pulled away, laughing, as elusive as stardust. His voice rasped in the back of his throat: “I need you.”

She smiled at him, and he thought she handed him the world. “I know. But you see,” she twirled one of her short locks around a finger (he wished he were that finger), “I cannot think of anything but how dreadfully unhappy this place has made me. If only I could get out, feel the wind on my skin!” She took his hand in her small ones and he could not tear his eyes away from the place he ended and she began. “If I could just be free again, I could think of other things.” She dragged her finger over the thin skin between his pointer-finger and thumb. “Of _us_.”

The thought of _them_ had him leaning towards her, his mouth full of impatience, one of his hands breaking free to cup her neck. The delicious curls of her hair curled around his fingertips. She slipped away, but her laugh this time was queer. He could not work through the muddle in his brain to discern why. 

“You are persistent, my lord!” Her arms lay at her sides, but something told him she wanted to cross them over her chest. He could see the shape of her breasts and the point of her nipples through the thinness of her shift. “But you must _wait_. The time is not now.”

Celegorm had never been suited to waiting. “I want you _now_.” He reached for her again, intent on having want he wanted. But his hands caught only her shift slipping through his fingers. This wasn’t right, the drowning thoughts insisted, something unnatural was at work here. But he couldn’t fathom what. 

“A kiss,” she promised, “I will give you a kiss, my lord, this very day, this hour, just take me up! Take me out of the caves, place my cloak in my hands and I shall give you all the kisses you desire!”

Something banged inside his head, like a knocker insistent upon entrance. He heard a voice like Maedhros’, all cool logic, pierce into the mess of lust and enchantment wreathing his thoughts. The voice wanted to know, quite reasonably, why he would let Lúthien go when Curufin had explained they might be able to solidify an alliance with Thingol if he were caught in the Fëanorions’ debt for the return of his daughter. “No,” he answered slowly, his tongue thick like a sleeper struggling into awareness. “I do not think I want to do that.”

He thought he should leave, he thought this very loudly. He turned to go. Suddenly Lúthien was before him, her body pressing into his, molding into all the hard planes of his form like she’d been made for this. Her arms leapt up and wrap around his neck. “Oh Celegorm! How I long for the wind! How I ache for freedom! Please, do not keep me here! You have broken my dancing legs; I cannot breathe in this prison when my—” She cut the words off, trembling like a caged bird in his arms.

“I do not want to cage you,” he enunciated slowly, as though through water, “but I think you will fly away if I take you into the sun. I do not want you to fly away.” He took her hips in his hands, felt their slightness. His fingers rested on the yielding swell of her ass. She trembled so fiercely.

“Celegorm!” She kissed his mouth, her lips like violets; his nostrils flooded with her scent. She did not smell like peril now, this was no caught predator in his arms. It seemed to him a dove, innocent, something to protect. How could he even think of caging something so pure? “I shall die here in this prison; I shall die! You must let me out!”

But he couldn’t let her go. What would Curufin say? And she would fly away and leave him. He did not want her to go. He wanted her to be his. It seemed harder than it should have been to escape the arms of a dove, but she kept clinging to him. He said something about fetching her cloak; he didn’t think she believed him, but she pulled away to study his face long enough for him to flee to the door. He locked it behind him.

He pressed his hands into his eyes until spots exploded behind his eyelids. There was sweat built up on his upper lip, foaming his brow. His body was shaking. He bit his tongue, drawing blood, swallowing, _fighting_. He threw back his head, the tendons on his neck bulging out as he roared, roared like a man whose whole body, will, and heart were thrown into a herculean task. The resistance buckled and he surged through into freedom.

He slumped against the door, panting, head pounding. Then the rage ignited, and he spun and punched his fist into the door. He cried out. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He cradled his bleeding hand against his chest. Of course the solid oak, spell enforced door stood strong. That was the whole point of choosing this room for that _witch_.

He wanted to tear in there and wrap his hands around her throat! But Curufin had plans for her, and as often as sanctimonious cowards liked to whisper the word Kinslayer to his back –he’d like to see them say it to his face!—Celegorm wasn’t in the habit of murder. So he spun on his heel and stalked off to find Curufin.

Curufin had claimed a chamber off the council rooms as his, and was almost always to be found there laboring over something or other (especially so since Finrod’s foolish quest). He was there now, and looked up when Celegorm entered with a bang. 

“Hard day?” Curufin asked idly, scrolling his signature in that perfect way of his. His desk was pristine; each pile of parchments stacked with precision, and all the missives, appeals, and levy lists categorized down to the last detail.

Celegorm snarled, and threw himself into pacing with all the wrath of a hurricane through the room but none of the destruction; Curufin wouldn’t tolerate him making a mess. He spit and hissed and ranted about what that _witch_ had done to him. When he had raged himself out, he threw himself onto the chair before Curufin’s desk.

Curufin hadn’t said anything, just let him shout himself hoarse. Now he said, perfectly collected as if Lúthien hadn’t tried to wrap his brother in an enchantment’s chains, “We shall have to take more care with securing her. She has proved more powerful than I’d thought.”

“Is that all you have to say?” 

Curufin lifted a cool brow, “Are you really surprised she employed whatever methods at her disposal to secure her freedom? We _are_ keeping her captive.”

“For her own good! She would have run off and gotten herself killed!”

“Of course. But she is unlikely to see it that way. And we are hardly involving ourselves in her eager quest to kill herself out of the goodness in our hearts.”

“But we haven’t _hurt_ her. She’s not starving in a dungeon! She had no right to try and make me –make Himrandir—her thrall!”

Curufin neither agreed nor disagreed. “I will write to Thingol today. If all goes according to plan, we should be able to add the not inconsiderable strength of Doriath to Maedhros’ gathered alliances.”

Celegorm shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. He didn’t have Curufin’s faith in the plan. “The only reason we are even dealing with _that_ —” He sucked in a breath. If he could strangle Thingol by killing his name, he would. That that Sinda had the nerve, the insolence, to name one of their father’s jewels as a bride price…well, Thingol should be kissing Morgoth’s toes for presenting the more pressing unharvested revenge. “Is because we want Thingol’s army. But you’re gambling on that coward’s love for a daughter he imprisoned.” Where was the love in that? Father would never have tried to _force_ his will upon them. 

Curufin said, “He did not want her to die, as she might, if she faded after the Mortal’s death.”

“ _You_ would never have held Celebrimbor prisoner, even if it meant letting him follow his heart into death one day. And I would never have tried to take _her_ freedom away.” His voice dropped like coins into an empty jar. Clank, clank, clank. The sound of his hollow spaces where she used to rest before he’d surgically removed her. Even now, years dead, he could not say her name.

Curufin’s mouth pulled down. “Perhaps,” he said softly, maybe even a little fearfully, and by that note Celegorm knew he was thinking of how he might react to a threat upon Celebrimbor’s life, even one that ran up against Celebrimbor’s happiness. But Celegorm wasn’t fearful; he knew Curufin would make the right choice, even if it killed him to do it. Curufin would not let his love warp into prison bars. Curufin stirred himself and said, “Regardless of the nature of Thingol’s love for his daughter, he would surrender much to see her returned to him. Which is exactly what we shall do –after he has crawl out from behind his coward’s shield.”

Celegorm still didn’t think it would work. “We might have to keep Lúthien captive here for years before Maedhros is ready to march on Morgoth. Too many things could go wrong; Lúthien could escape, or be set loose, and then where would we be?”

“No different from where we started,” Curufin dismissed. “It is far from a foolproof plan, yes, but it is not a gamble because we lose nothing if it fails. Thingol would never have stirred himself or his army. Holding Lúthien as payment for his army is the only coin he will listen to.” Curufin picked up his quill and pulled a fresh sheet of parchment from a drawer. 

“What if Thingol refuses to march, even for the promise of Lúthien’s return? Should we—a threat? Against her, if he doesn’t…?” If they threatened did that mean they would have to carry it through if Thingol decided to call their bluff? Would it be a bluff if it meant the difference between the thousands of soldiers in Doriath’s army marching against Morgoth and one woman’s…what? Life? Would they really kill her? Was Curufin prepared to take it that far? Was _he_?

No. This wasn’t Morgoth dangling Maedhros in front of them with an impossible choice of Maedhros returned if they only gave up another brother. Which one would they like to sacrifice in his place? Only Morgoth had never made that offer. Maybe he would have if he hadn’t consider them an enemy he’d already defeated, a broken-backed dog without Father or Maedhros to lead them. 

But they weren’t Morgoth, and even if it meant exposing their threat as en empty one, they wouldn’t lay their hands on Lúthien in violence if Thingol wouldn’t take the bait. What would even be the point? Just killing to save face? But it wouldn’t save anything; all it would do would sicken every ally they could have made. Even their own people, their own _brothers_ would have been disgusted. Celegorm would have been disgusted with himself too.

He looked up at Curufin when Curufin took too long to answer. Curufin would be disgusted too. He had to be. Of course he would be. Celegorm couldn’t doubt him. Only, he remembered a boy with hair white as stars and Curufin’s mouth all over him.

“No,” Curufin said, slowly. But then he met Celegorm’s gaze and in his eyes: a cliff’s edge, a drop, a long, long fall into destruction. “There is revenge, and then there is revenge.”

Curufin’s hands on Finrod’s boy. The rage. The _grief_. He had to find his brother inside that shell of self-hate and foulness and _bring him back_. 

Celegorm could breathe again because Curufin was still Curufin. He’d brought his brother back; he hadn’t fallen, not all the way. Celegorm had caught him on his way down and hauled him back up again, and maybe they still stood on that ledge, but they were holding each other back from the fall.

Curufin’s eyes dropped, but Celegorm knew just from the shape his mouth made that they had understood each other, and Curufin had felt Celegorm’s hand on his shoulder, an anchor and a comfort. 

Curufin ducked his head and busied himself with penning that letter to Thingol. He paused after a moment, and drew his mouth’s shape with the feathered tip of the quill. “Lúthien will need an attendant.”

Celegorm’s fingers drummed out a rhythm on the top of his knee-high boots. “A woman, I should think. And one that has no connection to us, and no fault in her captivity.”

Curufin hummed. “Orodreth’s daughter should work well. It would appease Orodreth if his daughter could assure him Lúthien is not being mistreated. It is unfortunate so many saw her on her arrival, but it could not be helped.”

“Lúthien would no doubt speak to the girl of leaving,” Celegorm frowned. 

“But she will also speak of _why_ she wants to leave,” Curufin was, as ever, one step ahead. “Even Orodreth cannot argue with us wanting to keep her safe. She is obviously a danger to herself if she wants to go running off to Tol-in-Gaurhoth.” Curufin’s voice was blank and cold as the smooth side of a river stone. It was the first time he’d spoken of Lúthien’s news of Finrod’s capture. But Curufin had known as well as Celegorm Finrod was doomed the moment he threw his lot in with the Mortal. They now knew where Finrod would die, but he’d been as good as dead since he walked out the Tower Doors.


	71. Chapter 58

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 58

“Finduilas,” she said to her, “It is not about love for them. It is about ownership. Inside every woman’s ribcage is a bird waiting to break free. But they do not want us free; they like us trapped there behind the chains of our ribs. They like being the only ones who hold the keys. But they aren’t, you see, they just want you to believe that.”

And Lúthien kissed her.

That was how it began. Or rather how it ended. It began like this:

Whispers in the halls, her fingers clenched around a food tray, her father’s voice encouraging her to ‘assess the situation.’ She’d heard all the rumors since Celegorm had brought the daughter of Thingol into their halls, some were wilder than others. But one thing everyone agreed on about the princess who had arrived tearfully to beg for what she couldn’t possibly understand: she was ignorant of the horrors of war. They turned their faces and shut their ears against her.

Now Finduilas was charged with Lúthien’s care by Celegorm, and doubly again by her father who wanted to know what the Fëanorions were about. Now the rumors she’d only half listened too –far more concerned with her father’s stumbles and strains against the new (unwanted, never wanted) crown upon his head—rose to eclipsing height. 

Finduilas knocked on the princess’ door. She ran her fingers over the edge of the tray, fiddled with the small arrangement of bluebells and lilacs she’d picked, and wondered again if it was a silly thing to do. It had seemed a worthy impulse at the time. Gwindor had teased her kindness and made her laugh until she’d kissed him under the apple tree, his hands smoothing over her waist, his fingers resting on her neck as if she were a bloom he feared bruising with his touch. 

They’d been betrothed a month before the world collapsed, and some days it was only the knowledge she would be his and he hers that kept her knees from buckling. Her dear papa. She didn’t know how she would ever forgive Uncle Finrod for leaving Father with this burden. Her father was a soldier; a simple, good, honest man. He had never possessed political aspirations, and had confided to her, after Tol Sirion was defiled, that he hoped for nothing more than to remain a solider the rest of his life. That hope was over now. 

She cherished Gwindor all the more for supporting her father when he needed a friend the most, even though Gwindor privately regretted not being in the city when Finrod called upon the loyal. Gwindor would have followed Finrod. Finduilas thanked The One he had not been able too.

The door remained closed. Finduilas knocked again. She had thought the princess confined to her chambers, how strange she did not answer her door. A sudden alarm of harm befalling the princess had Finduilas calling out: “Princess Lúthien, are you in there? I have come with your meal. If you are—”

The door opened and Finduilas’ breath caught. Glory stood before her. Lúthien could have fallen from the stars, so cloaked was she in their radiance. There was no smile on her mouth, no warmth in her eyes. Wondrous though she appeared, her beauty was worn with weariness.

“I am Finduilas, daughter of Orodreth, Steward of Nargothrond. Lord Celegorm asked me to see to your needs.” She held up the tray, “I brought your supper. If there is anything else you require please, do not hesitate to ask.”

Lúthien held the door open for her, but said as Finduilas slipped in, “Unless you can give me my freedom, you cannot help me.” The words were brittle. Finduilas looked away, down at her hands as she carefully set the tray down. 

“Forgive me,” Lúthien came to her and laid her hand next to Finduilas’. “I should not have spoken so. I am tired, but that is no fault of yours.”

Finduilas’ wanted to cover Lúthien’s delicate hand with her own, giving comfort as her mother used to, but she had not the boldness. Lúthien, even weary and captive, was so much _more_. Finduilas felt like a girl in a woman’s presence. 

She had known little female companionship outside her mother. No great friendships like the ones girls form when they whisper all their secrets into friends’ bosoms, giggle about men behind their hands, and braid each other’s hair like kin. Lúthien struck her as the kind of woman who must have had friends like that, must know all those girl-secrets passed from one to the other as they learned what it meant to be women. Finduilas clasped her hands before her, feeling awkward, simple, and uninteresting. She felt like a child. 

What kind of woman was she that it had taken her until passed her majority to feel the desires of one? Why had she thought the idea of Gwindor’s mouth on hers so odd and silly when all the other young women were reaching eagerly for adulthood, and dipping their toes in its waters (not too deep, just enough to skim the lines of propriety with stolen kisses and maybe, if the girl was very bold, a few touches allowed her admirer). Finduilas hadn’t wanted any of it. She’d been content to slip leggings under her skirts, thinking nothing of the way a tight, sensible braid did not become her, and go riding with Gwindor. She’d known he’d liked her in that giggly, secret way, but it had been a distant kind of knowledge.

At last her body had awoken, and she’d understood what all the fuss was about, but she still felt a few steps behind at every turn. She couldn’t help thinking many jokes and comments passed over her head, and wondering if the other young women at court were really laughing at her naivety and not with her –you could never tell with court ladies.

“It is forgiven,” she assured Lúthien. “I wish I could free you from this place, but the sons of Fëanor…their hold is very tight over Nargothrond. My father—” She stopped her tongue, reaching out to fuss with the flowers again. “I picked these for you, Princess. It must be hard, being a Wood-elf, to be confined in stone. Or so I have heard…” She trialed off, hoping she’d not given insult. 

The smallest of smiles lifted Lúthien’s lips, and Finduilas felt a surge of satisfaction that she had achieved even this small success. “I thank you for the kindness, Lady Finduilas. Yes, the Wood-elves would find cave-living unnatural, at least that was what the ones who came to Menegroth said. I, however, am not a Wood-elf.”

“Oh!” Finduilas’ eyes widened. “I beg your pardon, Princess, if I have offended you.”

“Not at all.” 

“It is only that you live in a forest, and I thought…I know the Sindar here in Southern Beleriand do not refer to themselves as Wood-elves, but in the North, well, the Wood-elves—that is the Sindar of Hithlum would refer to themselves as Wood-elves, so I thought…but of course the Sindar of Doriath and Southern Beleriand are very different from the Northern Sindar. I apologize—”

Lúthien touched her hand, and Finduilas’ mouth snapped closed. Lúthien tilted her head, and she looked so poised and confident Finduilas flushed, feeling a fool. 

“I see you meant no offense, so I will take none.” This time when Lúthien smiled it was a full one. Lúthien folded her hands before her, and the gesture was so graceful Finduilas felt ashamed standing next to Lúthien. Everything Lúthien did seemed perfect. “You are correct that the Sindar of these lands and Doriath share little in common with the Wood-elves of the north and east. Those Elves sundered from us long ago; even the Sindar of the north we in Doriath to not consider true Sindar for though they followed my father into Beleriand, they intermarried much with the Wood-elves and adopted many of their customs. Here in the south my father’s people held tighter to their culture and language, and we traded and intermarried often together, as we did Lord Cirdan’s Sindar in the Falas.”

Findulas frowned. “But..aren’t Lord Cirdan’s folk Teleri, Sea-elves?”

“Sea-elves, yes, but they are my father’s people, and though they, like the Northern Sindar, dispersed after my father was lost to them, our peoples retained close ties. At least until the Darkness returned and my mother fenced the Enemy out.”

“You must think me very simple for being ignorant of these things.” 

Lúthien picked up Finduilas’ hand and turned it over to examine the palm. “No. Not simple.” She traced the creases. Finduilas’ skin felt privileged, her heart selected. That a woman like this would turn even a scrap of thought to a peculiar young woman like herself was a heady feeling. How many times had she watched and envied other women who shared close female bonds? It did not come naturally to her; nothing which made a normal woman ever did. 

“I had met exactly four Noldor before I came here. I know as little of your people as you of mine. But I do not think I wish to learn more.” She dropped Finduilas’ hand. It felt empty. Lúthien pulled the food tray towards her. “Thank you for bringing my meal, lady.” She nodded at Finduilas, an obvious dismissal. 

Finduilas was suddenly no longer enamored with the princess. It was childish, but her hands obeyed the hurt in her chest; they snatched the small bouquet of flowers out of the water glass. “Since you are no Wood-elf, I will be taking these. I think my father would like them. He has, after all, just lost his uncle. He will be needing some cheering up now _yet another_ in our family is _dead_. I hope you do not mind.” 

She set her mouth and turned sharply so her skirts swirled about her ankles. It was a trick that had taken her hours of practice to get right. She doubted other ladies found the dramatic gesture so difficult. No doubt it came naturally to Lúthien.

Lúthien’s fingers wrapped around her forearm. Finduilas was tempted to yank her flesh away. “I must ask your forgiveness again, Lady Finduilas. I spoke out of the bitterness in my heart against my imprisonment. Please, don’t go.”

Lúthien turned her, and there was such a look of contrition on the princess’ face, how could Finduilas not forgive? Her heart was moved and it was Finduilas’ turn to take the princess’ hand. “Of course. And please forgive my anger. It is not usually so swift.” 

She tried to make light of it and placed the plucked flowers back in their glass, but the aftertaste of hurt lingered under her tongue. It wasn’t Lúthien who had put it there. It had been there for weeks, ever since the Adan had arrived in their halls like the long arm of the Valar’s Curse.

Lúthien led her over to a settee, sitting down beside her close enough their knees brushed. “You must not give up hope for your king. My mother saw him captured, but not dead. He might yet be rescued. I am sure of it.”

Finduilas’ drew her hand away, back to her own lap. She did not wish to speak of the quest. Was it not enough it had laid itself down over the light of Nargothrond and suffocated it? Was it not enough it stalked their hearts like a creeping shadow waiting to devour them? She felt cold, like she had during those last weeks in Minas Tirith before Father sent her away. There was something crawling in the shadows, hidden, but growing.

“Rescue is impossible,” Finduilas said in a dull voice, like a recitation of an oft-heard sentiment.

“That is what Celegorm said.” Lúthien’s mouth pinched. “But that is cowardice speaking. There is always hope as long as there is life.”

Finduilas looked down at her hands; they were clenched white in her lap. “There was never any hope. The quest was doomed from the start.” That was what Father said.

Lúthien sprang up, restless feet taking her in long paces before the settee and back again. “It was not hopeless! Think you Beren would have come here if he thought so? How often did I hear about his foster-father? Often enough to know he would never have come to Finrod if he believed, even for a moment, Finrod would be killed because of our love.” Lúthien stopped before her, sinking down next to Finduilas. “Beren believed Finrod could do the impossible.” A smile sweet with memory folded Lúthien’s mouth. “If a mountain had to be moved, Beren would have volunteered Finrod for the task, utterly sure of Finrod’s success. You must not think evil of Beren. He would not have come to Finrod unless he had faith in succeeding.”

Lúthien’s words did not give Finduilas hope, but they did ease a portion of the knot of her resentment against Beren. She must remember not to blame Beren for taking Finrod away. Finrod would have said to lay the blame on the one deserving it: the Enemy. Finrod would not have wanted her to give root to bitterness in her heart. He would have said life was too precious to live in bitterness. 

Lúthien leaned closer, dark eyes liquid and earnest. “I am glad you came, Finduilas –may I call you Finduilas?—it has been terribly lonely locked away here. I do not know how I will bear it!”

Finduilas’ heart constricted. Of course Lúthien was hungry for companionship, wasn’t it bad enough she was trapped in this room with Fëanorion guards outside the doors, must she also be denied basic human interaction? 

Finduilas reached between them and took Lúthien’s hand. “I shall do all I can to ease your imprisonment. You have my word. I shall speak with my father. Surely the people of Nargothrond have not fallen so far as to allow maidens to be held against their will!”

Lúthien looked away, and for a moment Finduilas thought she’d caused the princess offence, but then she saw the way Lúthien’s throat moved. She squeezed Lúthien’s hand, wishing she could take away this formidable woman’s distress. “You are very kind,” Lúthien composed herself. There were no tears on her cheeks. Finduilas didn’t think Lúthien was the kind of woman who gave in to tears. “You remind me of Beren. It is the kind of thing he would have said. He has such faith in the world. I do not know how he manages it, not after everything he has suffered.”

“You must love him very much.” _He loved you enough to brave Angband for you. He loved you enough to lead Finrod to his death._

“Beren,” Lúthien’s chest swelled with purpose. “My treasure. It is for him that I left Doriath, and he is the reason I must free myself from here with all haste. I must rescue my beloved. He needs me.”

Finduilas was shocked. “ _You_ go to Tol-in-Gaurhoth? But you are a woman!” The idea was just so absurd. 

Lúthien smiled at her. It was the kind of smile a wise woman wore looking down at an injured child. “You must never let a man tell you you cannot do something, Finduilas. Do not underestimate yourself because of your sex.” And then, leaning closer as if telling Finduilas the secret of the world: “If you want to, you could come with me to Tol-in-Gaurhoth. We could rescue your uncle together.”

Finduilas pulled back. “I do not think my father would approve. I could not possibly leave him, what if I died? How would he get on without me? And what of Gwindor? He would be heartbroken. No, I couldn’t possibly.”

“No doubt they would both try to stop you. That is the way with men. They love you so long as they can control you. The minute you do something they disapprove of, they try to lock you up.”

Finduilas stood. “My father and Gwindor are _nothing_ like the sons of Fëanor! They would never hurt me!”

Lúthien smile was pitying. “That is what I thought too. Until the day my father imprisoned me.”

Finduilas gasped. “But surely—my father would never—he is not like that.” But doubt had been planted, and over the course of Lúthien’s imprisonment its seed would be watered until it took root.

“Perhaps he is not,” Lúthien said like she didn’t believe it. “But you can be sure of one thing: this Gwindor you speak of would.” Now there was nothing pitying in Lúthien’s voice; it was consumed with bitterness. “Men wish to possess us. They wish us to be pretty pictures they can look at when they feel the urge, but when they are through looking, through taking, they put us back on the shelf to gather dust. That is not living. This,” she spread her hands about her cage, “is not living. But if men had their way, _all_ women would be held thus!”

“No. That is not true.” Finduilas wanted to step away, but couldn’t. There was something compelling about the words, as if they dropping into all the secret places of her womanhood and filled in the silences, the questions, every doubt she’d ever thought in the security of night. Had she not felt stifled at times? Had she not wished to wander free like Gwindor, ride without the confines of skirts? Had she not ached to learn swordplay as a child in Minas Tirith before her mother set needles and account books into her hands? Had not every daughter wanted these things before they learned they could not go running off to be the hero in the stories because they were women, and women did not do such things. 

But Gwindor was not like the men Lúthien described. He was not like the Fëanorions. “Gwindor loves me,” she told Lúthien. “He is brave and noble and honorable; he is not like those other men. He has never lied to me, or tried to pressure me into something I was uncomfortable with. I love him.” Her hands trembled, but she lifted her chin like the princess of Nargothrond.

Lúthien’s mouth twisted. “You love him.” She rose, and though Finduilas stood the taller, she felt young and unsure caught under that gaze. “Yes, I can see you love him. As a child loves. A little girl.” Finduilas sucked in a breath. “Never lied to you? That is the belief of a child. Does not think like other men? Only a naïve girl would claim such. Tell me, Finduilas,” Lúthien’s voice dropped into secrets and musk and apple-tree kisses that moved into something much more than Gwindor’s hands on her waist. “Do you know what it is to love like a woman? Have you ever felt desire so intense you kissed the stars? Do you know what it is to shake apart under another’s hands and never want to be put back together again?”

Finduilas’ cheeks burned, and she felt ever inch of her innocence. She really was a child. She fled from Lúthien’s chambers, confused and afraid, with something pressing against the back of her throat, rising. 

She met Gwindor later. He still smiled like kindness, and kissed her palms as if she were something delicate (something to be caged?). He still made her laugh, but not as loudly, and smile, but not as brilliantly. 

Something itched in the back of her throat. A caged thing wanting to claw out. He kissed her mouth, framed her face with his hands, asked her if ‘this was all right?’ when he ran his hands down the curves of her spine. This meant he loved her, didn’t it? He was gentle with her as he should be, wasn’t that right? It didn’t mean he thought her weak. It didn’t mean he thought she belonged in a pretty painting. Did it?

That was how it began. This was how it ended. This was how Lúthien stole a piece of the heart that didn’t belong to her, and how Finduilas helped her run away with it:

Lúthien’s skin was a velvet shadow in the lamp light. Flickering. Flickering. The shadows dancing.

Finduilas watched her from the other side of the checkerboard. “Your move.”

Lúthien’s full lashes dropped. The candlelight glinted in the bottoms of her black eyes. She sighed. “Must I? You have already captured almost all my pieces.” But she moved a checker with only a slightly sullen slide.

Finduilas smiled. “You should not have agreed to play, then. You know I always win. Father says you should never start something you do not intent to finish.” Finduilas reached out for the winning move, but Lúthien caught her wrist between her fingers, encircling it. She felt captured like a checker piece.

“I wish you would not do that,” Lúthien whispered, eyes fixed on Finduilas’ face.

“What?” 

Lúthien smiled at the breathlessness in Finduilas’ voice. It was the kind of smile that twisted in Finduilas’ belly, and burned uncomfortable alone her cheekbones. Gwindor used to turn her stomach inside out. But that was before. Before Lúthien. Finduilas didn’t want to think of Gwindor, so she didn’t. Lúthien was right here, touching her. 

Lúthien turned her wrist, and placed two fingers over Finduilas’ pulse. “Do not speak about your father like that. As if his words were law.”

“But he is my father.” The defense was weak, much weaker than last week, or the one before.

“He is not a god. He is not infallible. You should be free to form your own mind.” She rubbed her fingers over the thin skin on the inside of Finduilas’ wrist. “You have a luminous spirit just waiting to break free, if you only let it.”

Finduilas pulled her hand back reluctantly. 

Sometimes Lúthien would rest her head on Finduilas’ stomach, other times it would be Finduilas’ head pillowed on Lúthien’s. On those days she would do everything she could to make Lúthien laugh, just so she could feel Lúthien’s abdomen shaking beneath her cheek. But it never went further. How could it when Finduilas couldn’t think beyond a press of mouth against mouth? How could it when the only lips respectability said could press against hers were her betroth’s? 

Lúthien looked disappointed when Finduilas’ took back her hand. It was becoming harder and harder to remember why she must not follow the velvet shadows of Lúthien’s skin. Lúthien rose to her knees from where she’d lain belly-first before the checkerboard, and then to her feet. An ankle flashed, a sliver of calf, before her dress re-arranged itself. 

“If only I could dance!” Lúthien said. It was a longing often falling from her lips, but never granted. There were no forest paths to dance down in these cave chambers.

Finduilas jumped up, the need to give Lúthien whatever she wanted moving within her. She put her hands on the meal table and began to shove. Its feet scrapped loudly over the stones.

“What are you doing?” Lúthien was by her side.

“Moving this,” Finduilas said, putting more of her weight against it. “We can move the settee over there by the bed. It is not much, but will it be enough to dance?”

Lúthien pressed her palm into her stomach and stared at Finduilas for a long, unblinking moment as Finduilas tried not to notice. The table squeak, squeak, squeaked. Lúthien’s fingers touched Finduilas’ neck, just there where her throat met her shoulders. Finduilas’ dress was cut in a shallow V that concealed her breasts but extenuated the slender line of her shoulders. She shuddered under the touch. 

“You would give me back my dancing legs?” Lúthien whispered into the spinning moment.

“Yes. If I could,” Finduilas looked back at Lúthien through hair spilling in upset waves from the passion of her table moving. 

Finduilas wished she were brave enough to measure the weight of Lúthien’s curls in her fingers. They would be light, like a child’s, free of mass. The loss of Lúthien’s mane did not diminish her beauty. It solidified it. How many women would have been able to cut off their greatest vanity and look all the more striking for its absence?

They moved the settee together. Their eyes met and clung. “May I dance for you Finduilas?”

“I would like that.”

Lúthien’s hands cupped the air. Her bare toes pointed at the floor. Her eyelashes fluttered, holding the poise for three heartbeats; then she swayed into movement. Soft at first, a sliding of feet over the stones, an elegant bending of elbows, the arching of a neck. And then Lúthien was spinning heaven.

Lúthien danced like a raindrop. To catch her would be to watch her shatter in your palms. You could not hold the substance of moonlight in your arms. Lúthien danced like she knew all the secrets of the universe. A galaxy rode in the curves of her spine, the flat planes of her belly. Her hips rocked like whispers in the dark, skin pressed to skin. 

Lúthien owned her flesh. It was told in the story of the dance. No other could possess what she had claimed. Lúthien’s hands beckoned, inviting Finduilas to lay claim to her own body. Be free, be free, be free, they chanted. Become who you were created to be. 

Finduilas went to her. She tried to take hold of Lúthien, captivated, overrun with yearning. But she could not touch Lúthien until she joined the dance. 

Finduilas’ feet picked up the rhythm, feeling clumsy until Lúthien clasped her hands about Finduilas’ and they unfold beauty together. Lúthien took her in her arms, pressing Finduilas against her chest, molding them as Finduilas had never known two women could fit together. 

“Let me show you what true freedom tastes like,” Lúthien breathed in her ear, hot breath against her neck. 

Finduilas closed her eyes and thought Lúthien must be reading all the desires between her lashes, because when Lúthien kissed her it was everything she could never articulate but must have secretly thirsted for. Lúthien kissed her like she was something fierce, something strong and unbreakable in her hands, something to let loose.

Lúthien’s teeth scraped her tongue, fingers pinning Finduilas’ face between them with a force Gwindor had never believed she could bear (but she could, she could). Lúthien did not lay her on the bed like a flower, she threw her there and then climbed up to straddle Finduilas’ waist, dress hiking up her thighs.

Lúthien placed Finduilas’ hands on her hips, locking them there with her own. And then she undulated. 

“Ah!” Finduilas cried and Lúthien ate it. Her teeth devoured Finduilas. Her lips left bruises, her fingers pulled Finduilas’ skirt up and rubbed her nipples through the fabric of her bodice. Lúthien trailed heat and _oh!_ up her thighs. 

Everything was happening so fast, too slow. Lúthien wrote secrets between Finduilas’ thighs with wet fingertips. Her mouth sucked desire into Finduilas’ neck, her collarbone, her shoulder. Finduilas’ hands grasped desperately to the sheets, Lúthien’s skirts, and ran up the ribbon of Lúthien’s spine, feeling the vertebrae shift like dancers to the rhythm of Lúthien’s body. 

Finduilas bit the heel of her palm to slow herself down. Lúthien took it away, her lush mouth in Finduilas’ ear, tongue licking firecrackers down Finduilas’ neck: “Let me hear you. Do you like that?”

“Yes! Please!” Lúthien spread and lifted Finduilas’ legs, cupping the backs of Finduilas’ knees where the skin was soft and sensitive. 

Wet heat was on her _down there_ , where not even her own fingers had ever touched. “Tell me what you like. Just like that, my sweet. Louder!” Finduilas could do nothing less than follow Lúthien’s commands. She cried out in shock and love and moremoremoremore when Lúthien dipped her head and drank her up.

Finduilas inhaled summer, and mouthed butterflies. Lust like terror flooded over the banks of her pores, and she shook apart in Lúthien’s arms as she screamed up at stars whirling overhead, close enough to kiss.

That was the night she drank tipsy on Lúthien’s smile, her touch, her kiss. That was the night Lúthien’s clever hands stole her body, her heart, her soul. 

A week of bliss followed, of hand holding and kisses and touches they never had to hide for no one came to bother them here. A week in another world nearer the stars than this one. And then Lúthien was gone, slipping out the Secret Door with her cloak thrown over her head, Huan by her side, and Finduilas’ kiss still lingering on her mouth. Finduilas could not be there to watch them go. She had to attend the feast she’d planned just for this night. She had to pretend to be Finduilas, Princess of Nargothrond, the doe-eyed girl still blushing every time her hand brushed her betroth’s. She had to pretend she had not planned everything: Huan stealing the cloak from his master’s chambers, the feast, the revelation of the Secret Door, the escape. She had to pretend her heart was not fleeing with Lúthien to Tol-in-Gaurhoth, sent there by her own hands.


	72. Chapter 59

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 59

There had been a cavern of stars inside Finrod’s throat. Now there were bones. 

Beren’s arm wrapped tight around Finrod’s waist, crossing with Edrahil’s on Finrod’s other side. Finrod had his arms thrown around their shoulders as he struggled to put one foot in front of the other. They still stunk like Orcs. The boiled leather and crudely sewn burlap of their disguises rubbed against their skin. Their flesh now shone pale, olive, bronze where it had been dark as plums with Finrod’s spell over them.

Finrod had won. He’d saved them all, and it had cost him everything. Beren squeezed the limp body of his foster-father tighter. Finrod’s head lulled, eyes blank, caught in the in-between world where the song-enchantments had been spun. 

“Not much further, my king,” Edrahil lied. They were still deep in enemy territory. They’d fought their way out of Tol-in-Gaurhoth after Finrod had thrown Sauron down, but it had only been the shock to Sauron’s servants that had afforded them this small victory. 

“How far to the ford?” Edrahil called to Ramba running lead. Ramba fell back to whisper something in Edrahil’s ear. Beren took this to mean the worst. “Almost there,” Edrahil said to Finrod. How much those clouded-eyes comprehended of their situation was hard to judge.

Finrod’s hand squeezed tighter around his shoulders, and Beren’s mouth filled with mud. How could he have done this to Finrod? Beren brushed the hand on his shoulder with the back of his own. It felt like a withered claw. 

Beren averted his eyes from Finrod’s grey face. Still dressed in their Orc disguises, the wanness of Finrod’s face and the dullness of his eyes, made his appear disturbingly Orc-like. Finrod had lost a part of himself in the Song-battle. Something vital had been torn away, and Beren feared it could never be recovered.

It was all his fault.

_Beren._

Beren sucked in a breath, feet stumbling. 

“What is wrong?” Edrahil looked at him with worry he did not deserve.

“I thought… never mind. It is nothing.” Beren pushed his burning legs to moving faster.

_Beren._

Beren jerked his head around. There is was again. His name, as if spoken into his head. “Finrod?” He looked down at the unfocused eyes. 

Something chuckled in his head. It tasted of iron and rust and rot. No, this voice defiling him was not Finrod’s.

_Beren, we have her._

“Who are you?” he cried aloud, startling Edrahil running at his side. He barely heard the Elf’s question, so consumed was he with the voice in his head.

It laughed again, scraping claws down his mind. He flinched away. _I am the one who will kill your beloved Tinúviel if you do not do as I sssay._

“Lúthien!” 

“Beren, what is going on?” But Beren could not answer. A stone had plunged into the pit of his stomach.

 _Yessss,_ it hissed like a snake. _The Maia-child. Ssshe came, ssseeking you, and now ssshe liesss bound and caged in our dungoussss._ Images flashed in his head: Lúthien chained cruelty to a wall, Orcs circling her, her long, shadowy hair trailing in the dirt, her lips bloodied as they struck her. And the last: a whip brandished.

“No!” Beren’s voice tore from his throat. He could run no more, his feet frozen like his body with horror.

 _It need not come to thisss._ The voice purred. _Give usss the Elf-Sssinger and you ssshall have her. Unsssspoiled._

“What do you see?” Finrod slurred in his arms.

“Finrod?” Beren forgot the voice for a moment. He touched the grey face, the flickering eyes.

“Beren, we must hurry! They are close upon us!” Edrahil hosted Finrod higher in his arms. 

“Lúthien!” Beren looked back at the black spike of Tol-in-Gaurhoth rising from a bed of writhing shadows. “They have captured her! They have her there, in their dungeons! I must rescue her!”

“Your lady is safe in Doriath,” Edrahil reminded him. “It is illusion. This whole place is crawling with it. Come. We must fly.”

Images slammed into him. Lúthien riding out from Doriath, a company of Elven archers around her. Her face set in that fierce expression of strength he loved so well. He saw her reach Tol-in-Gaurhoth, saw her cast down Orcs and wolves until a demon of shadow rose up before her and threw her down. He saw the Elves she’d ridden with die, one by one, protecting their princess to the last.

 _Did ssshe not ssssay ssshe would alwayssss protect you?_ The voice mocked. _Sssee how ssshe tried. Sssee how ssshe failed._

Beren feel to his knees. “They have her. It is true, it is true.”

“Get up quickly, and shut your mind against these lies! Ramba!” Edrahil called the Elf over. “Help me with Finrod. Hurry!”

“No, no, they have her! They have her!” Beren clawed at the dirt. “I must go back; I must—”

 _Give usss the Elf-Sssinger!_ The voice slammed into him like a fist. _Give usss the Sssinger or watch asss we defile her, one by one, until her ssspirit breaksss and her ssssoul fleesss._

Beren’s hands fisted in the dirt. He rocked.

“Beren,” Finrod called him. Finrod, his foster-father, who’d loved him enough to brave Tol-in-Gaurhoth for him. Finrod who had already sacrificed _everything_ for him. How could he do as they asked? How could he give them Finrod? How could he sit here and watch as they killed Lúthien slowly, in the most horrendous way possibly for an Elf? How could he choose?

“Tell me what you hear.” Finrod’s voice, once more beautiful than starlight, croaked in his throat like an old crone’s. Beren hunched away.

“They have Lúthien. They are going to—they are going to _hurt_ her. I can’t—” Beren choked.

Finrod said, voice somehow finding peace in this hell: “Why are they showing you this? They must want something.”

There was no condemnation in the words, but the eyes, once distant, were now focused on Beren. Finrod knew. He _knew_.

Beren dug his nails into his neck. “They want—they want…”

_Give usss the Sssinger now or watch her defilement!_

“I can’t. I _can’t_ ,” Beren pleaded with Finrod as he was torn in two, ripped right from his heart to his soul. Finrod looked back, those eyes so defeated.

Beren rose. His sword was already in his hand and he lifted it now. He settled its tip at the hollow of Finrod’s neck. “They want you.” His voice was as dead as Finrod’s eyes.

“Traitor!” Edrahil brought his sword up, ready to strike a blow upon the Man who would now, after everything, stab them in the back.

“No!” Finrod’s voice stayed him. “Beren must not be harmed. My oath still binds me.”

Beren’s hand shook. So this was all that stood between them now, an oath. No other bonds held Finrod’s hand. Beren could not have it both ways. He had had to choose, though it cost him the only family he had left. He was dead. He was walking dead inside his skin. 

“But no oath holds you, my loyal, beloved friends,” Finrod said to the companions gathered close. “Go now. Take what paths you may find, and return to Nargothrond. This is the last thing I will ask of you. I release you from your bonds of loyalty.”

“No, my king!” They cried. Edrahil the loudest. “We will never leave you! We would rather die!”

“If you love me,” Finrod struggled in Edrahil’s arms, but was too weak to free himself from his sworn-companion’s hold. “You will not make me watch you die! Give me the peace of knowing my oath did not doom you all!”

But they would not abandon him. It seemed a long time Finrod urged them to leave him while they all remained stubbornly beside their king, but it could not have been more than minutes. Either way, it was long enough for the Orcs and wolves to sniff them out in the shadows and encircle them, cutting off any hope of escape, and knocking the final nail in their argument.

They would not go down without a fight, but Beren could not afford to allow them one, not when the voice was pressing, pressing, pressing in his head, showing him the whip even now striking against Lúthien’s back for his delay. 

Beren took Finrod from Edrahil’s arms, his sword pressed into Finrod’s neck and Edrahil’s eyes looking murder upon him. At sword-point he delivered Finrod into the arms of the Orcs. He looked away as they passed Finrod from one groping claw to another, before Finrod was dumped at the feet of a tall figure robbed in shadow.

The figure drew a knife, long and serpentine, and pressed it to Finrod’s jugular. When the figure spoke, Beren recognized the hissing voice. “Drop your weaponsss or I ssslit hisss throat.”

“Give me Lúthien first!” Beren could not look at the still body lying at the shadow-figure’s feet. Finrod lay as if he’d lost all hope. His face so withered, eyes so listless, he might as well already be dead.

The figure laughed, casting back its head, and its hood fell back. Hair black as sin framed a shockingly feminine face. It took Beren a moment to realize the figure was a woman. She stood taller than any Edain, and her voice was deep as a man’s. Her teeth glinted like fangs from the redness of her mouth.

“Ssssuch a child,” the woman laughed. It was like snake fangs sinking into Beren’s skin. “You have been deceived, and ssso easssily! Ssshe is not here, your Tinúviel. Ssshe never wassss.”

Beren fell, as if taking a blow in the gut. No. No.

“Bind them,” the woman ordered, picking Finrod up by his long hair, once pale gold, now stained with filth, and dragged him away.

It had been for nothing. And death was too generous a fate for Beren son of Barahir.

*

Draugluin lay down on a bed of dead leaves under dead trees in a dead forest with a dead sky above. Her furred belly pressed into the diseased womb of the land, and the dry leaves shifted closer. Her heat was the closest they could get to the remembrance of being alive.

She wished the black curtain over Tol-in-Gaurhoth would roll back so she could see Tilion’s light. Strange that when she walked in the form of a wolf she should crave a brother so long forsaken. 

Dead branches cracked overhead, one landed near her crossed paws. They wanted to wrap around her spine, split her open, and feel what it is to be alive again. They wanted to remember what it felt like to drink from the earth and grow strong with sap pulsing in their veins. The warmth of Draugluin’s body reminded them what the sun felt like.

The branch’s twigs wiggled like broken fingers as it crept across the dead ground towards her. She snapped it between her jaws. Unlike the leaves, the branches were far less passive in their pursuit of life. 

“Fighting with the underbrush again?” The voice was the silk of lust curling around Draugluin’s skin.

“Always, my love.” Draugluin shifted, her backbone cracked. Her face shrunk from the elongated snout of a wolf into square bones. Her claws became blunt fingertips, and her crooked knees and elbows straightened into a human’s.

Draugluin looked up at her tall lover through the storm of her curls. Thuringwethil glided on shadows to where Draugluin sprawled on her belly, and sat down with the fluidity of water. Thuringwethil sunk her fingers into the short, tight curls on Draugluin’s head, running through their thickness as one would a dog’s fur. Draugluin bumped her head against the caress, leaning in.

“Mairon isss ssstill weak. But hisss sssstrength returnsss.”

“He shall need it when the Lord hears of his defeat at the Elf-Singer’s hands.” Draugluin rolled onto her back. Thuringwethil’s hand moved to follow the trail of hairs, blue as Draugluin’s wolf pelt, from navel to groin. Draugluin spread her legs, and Thuringwethil obliged her. Draugluin’s hand, its back dusted with hairs, slid though the silk of Thuringwethil’s hair.

“He wantsss to keep the Sssinger alive asss a gift to the Lord. He sssay the Sssinger issss a lord of the Exilesss.”

Draugluin arched her hips into the hand cupping her sex. “It won’t save him from the Lord’s wrath.”

Thuringwethil bent and kissed Draugluin’s shoulder, just the tip where the bone ended. “Keep out of Mairon’sss way when he recoversss. He will be ssseeking a target for hisss wrath.”

Draugluin barked a laugh, and nuzzled Thuringwethil’s thigh. Even after all these Ages, Thuringwethil still worried over her. It was just the same when they served the Valar, before they found freedom with Melkor in exchange for another kind of bondage. They did not mind Melkor’s lordship as long as he let them be for the most part. Sometimes, when Draugluin loped through the dead forests and the sickened lands of her master, she remembered the joy of running the wilds alongside Oromë. It was a pale regret, insignificant next to what she’d gained.

Draugluin picked up Thuringwethil’s hand. It was a perfect fit for her own. She had forsaken Oromë and the beauty of untamed lands for this. For this hand of sharp nails and thin-boned fingers entwined with her own sturdy one. 

Draugluin didn’t care about right or wrong or who she hurt for the sake of love. To Draugluin, Thuringwethil was the only thing that mattered in the universe. She would burn the world for one kiss from those ripe lips.

*

The magic felt like claws resting against the corners of Finrod’s eyes, ready to rip them out. The tower he’d built with his own hands and been defiled by the hands before him, shook with the Power of Sauron’s song. Finrod took his deeper. He plunged into the color green.

Magic was the heart’s reflection, and Sauron sang with the hate, anger, and pain that were the backbone of Dark Magic. He wielded the full power of Darkness unfettered by the empathies of a soul. Finrod flung love and life to abundance back in his face.

He painted the world green with the hills of Valinor on a perfect day. He slapped the beauty of laughing mouths, simple acts of kindness, and a smiling heart into the boiling festers of Sauron’s hate.

He sang of love like sunlight. He sang of a whirlwind love for a woman with shell-white hair chiming like bells in the wind. He did not sing of love like fire, like obsession. That love he could not bring into this chamber. It threaded too deeply into his bones, spiraling down his spine with betrayal so tightly interwoven that to sing of it would have placed a blade into Sauron’s hands.

Finrod stood before the sunless throne of Sauron, shoulders pulled back, vocal cords thrust forward. Power curled about his skin like copper, ice, and the panting of a ravenous beast. His hair wiped like a banner of the House of Finarfin, all it needed was two green-eyed snakes enfolded into the field of gold. His face shone with inhuman sharpness as he grasped Light in his hands and battled with Darkness on an invisible plane.

He had never felt more alive than in this moment. 

And then it turned, like a horse three days dead.

He stood in the Ring of Doom again. Fëanor was there, and Fingolfin beside him. The sky went out. The world tilted and the lonely stars screamed.

Sauron had found the perfect weapon.

Finrod re-lived the Darkening. It was a struggle, but he kept his head up, his tongue sewing light into despair. But then he was standing on the beaches of Alqualondë. They were red, and the bodies plied high, Noldor and Teleri alike. He faltered. 

He saw himself, face ashen with shock as he walked though the corpses of friends, some kin on his mother’s side. Sauron’s song took him to the long, weary march up the coast of Aman. It showed him following Fëanor’s boats. It showed him his own hypocrisy.

He hadn’t allowed himself to think on the Kinslaying. He’d pushed it aside. There was the knowledge, but not the true horror of the memory. _Fëanor had led his people down a treacherous path_ , he’d think, but of his own actions following the slaughter he could not dwell. He’d been pretending for a long time that he’d done nothing wrong. Maybe that was why he was so quick to accept the Fëanorions. A part of him knew, always knew, he was as guilty as they. 

His blade had never left its sheath, but sometimes inaction was as blame-worthy as deeds. Sin was not just doing what you shouldn’t; it was also not doing what you should. What had kept him following Fëanor, for all he claimed it was only Fingolfin he followed, was not vengeance for his mother’s slain people. The Fëanorions’ crime stained his hands the minute he stood silent, picked up his feet, and followed them.

Sauron ruined him. There in that tower of shadows, Finrod Felagund was broken. It was his own hands that ripped out his backbone, picked it up, examining himself vertebra by vertebra, and been sickened by what he found.

Finrod thought he would have curled into a ball, lain himself down and let Sauron finish what he was too much of a coward to do with his own hands, if he had been alone. But he wasn’t alone.

His counter song was but a thread. He didn’t have the strength to fight Sauron’s Black Magic when his heart was withered within the teeth of his ribcage. His song would have folded into itself, overwhelmed by the destruction of his own snapping, but then something was burning with the pureness of pearls. 

Celebrimbor’s necklace laughed light, and flared like a strike of lightning upon his breast. It spun Power into Finrod’s voice, but more essentially, it pressed Estel into his heart.

Finrod threw Sauron down, breaking his song, flooding the tower with green enough to consume the sky. His knees folded with the last note, but Edrahil was there to scoop him up. Finrod was weary to the point of passing out. He’d never felt more dead in his life. 

He felt as empty as the cup of a beggar’s hand. Dry inside, like he was a maple tree all the sap had been sucked from, leaving only the husk. His magic felt snuffed out. He’d kept pulling and pulling, and giving and giving until his very life-force had been fed from.

He lay now on the cold floor of a dungeon. Yellow eyes circled in the darkness. The panting of wolves crawled over his nape as if their snouts pressed against his back.

Beren’s head was pillowed in his lap like a child’s. Beren had cried out his remorse and shame into Finrod’s skin. Finrod petted the matted hair. His fingers were no longer fine and elegant. 

The rest were gone. It was only Beren and him now. For himself, he forgave Beren. It was not Beren’s fault he was deceived by a master. But for his dead companions he’d heard screaming from the darkness when the wolves dragged them away, he could not forgive Beren. 

Everything had changed in these pits. Everything was inside out. He felt like he’d lost himself. He could not see passed the knives in his back, could see nothing but the betrayals piling one on top of each other like a house of corpses. He was left betrayed and broken to die alone in the dark with bitterness and regret cozying up to him like lovers.

His heart felt sore and tenderized.

Curufin. His iron ingot with the cold, dense center. His betrayer. His flash-moment lover. The one who couldn’t risk letting anyone in; Valar forbid Finrod actually got close enough to touch the cold smiles. The one who kept his family in his belly and gulped them down to keep them close (to keep them from running away).

_Do I forgive you now, Curufin? Who would blame me if I did not?_

They came for Beren. He took Beren’s place. He wrestled a werewolf with a pelt like the blue of the moon, and killed it with his teeth and his claw-like hands. His body was as savaged as his heart now. 

He died in the darkness with yellow eyes circling him. Curufin’s name tore from his throat like a dirty word as his life went out. He wished he’d kept a piece of himself sewn up inside Curufin’s mouth. Maybe then he wouldn’t find it so hard to forgive. Maybe then he wouldn’t feel so forsaken.

*

She found Beren hunched over a brutalized body, cradling it like a child from his womb. He vomited on the ground, some of the sickness landing on the corpse’s gnarled hands.

“Beren.” She took him into her arms, pressing his face to her neck, and held him as he wept. It was impossible to identify the body. The hair was a filthy brown, the face disfigured by grooves of claw marks, and the nose torn clean off. Beren would not let it go.

“He is gone, Beren,” she tried to pull him away. Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s tower was a ruin around them. Sauron had fled, deafened by Huan’s jaws, and the fallen Maia, the shadow-woman, had been slain by Lúthien’s own magic. But this was no field of flowers in the sunlight. The land still groaned with evil, its bones infected with the black pitch of sorcery. 

“I killed him. I killed him,” Beren keened, rocking the broken body in his arms. He pressed his mouth against the mess of the body’s forehead, kissing blood and ripped skin.

“Is it Finrod?” She looked into the dead, staring eyes of the corpse. They were a faded blue, like fabric left too long in the sun.

Beren’s lips and teeth smeared on the brow as he opened his mouth wide as a bottomless cave to howl his grief into the night. “I killed him!”

“No,” Lúthien twisted her fingers in Beren’s ragged hair. “It is not your fault. If you had seen what would happen when you went to Nargo—”

“It is my fault,” Beren swung wild, stranger’s eyes upon her. All their light and warmth was gone. “I thought you were captured. I thought they had you.” The confession was a wet, strangled thing. “They said if I gave them the Singer then you would be safe. But it was all lies!” Beren’s teeth chattered as he clutched Finrod’s body against him. “I wish I were dead. I am a faithless wretch. I am a murderer. I am a—”

“Stop!” Lúthien’s voice shook. Not her Beren. His light, his pureness, couldn’t die here in the dark. She pressed her forehead to his. “Come back to me, my love. Come back.”

Slowly Beren untangled a hand from Finrod’s soiled hair and lifted it to cup the back of her skull. “Your hair is gone.” Lúthien pressed her eyelids tight. Beren’s voice was too empty, his words too inane.

“Yes. I made this cloak with it.” She guided Beren’s hand down to her shoulder to rest on the silken fabric. “It will conceal us, my love. Not even Morgoth’s eyes will discover us.”

Beren touched her cheek. “My hero.” Lúthien caught his hand in hers and pressed her cheek against his warmth. “You are always saving me. What would I do without you?” The words should have made her breast swell with love, but they were too hollow.

Her Beren was gone. The one who had faith in mountain movers. The one who had clasped her hand as he promised no Dark Lord could keep them apart. The one who’d looked out at the world though eyes that had seen too-much and yet, somehow, could still see beauty in everything.

She would get him back. He’d been hers to protect and cherish, but she’d failed. She would fix this, she would.

She placed her hands on Beren’s cheek and urged him to look at her. He did, and she saw his destruction. It hardened her spine. Slowly, carefully, like a seamstress laboring over the most difficult and significant design of her life, Lúthien entered Beren’s mind and began to cut. Tinny snips, a tuck here and there. She had to remove more of him then she wanted, but what happened here in Tol-in-Gaurhoth was too deeply entwined with his fostering in Nargothrond to erase only this one horror. 

She took away the memory of his betrayal. She respun the tale of Finrod and Sauron’s Song-battle so that Finrod was the one who’d fallen. When she was finished, she pulled gently back, and looked into Beren’s blinking eyes.

“Lúthien?” Then he looked down at the body in his arms. His face crumpled with grief, but there was no self-destruction, no memory of his own sins to break him. “Finrod,” Beren closed his eyes. “He died to save me. In the pits. I can never forget his sacrifice.”

“He was a true hero,” she combed her fingers through Beren’s hair. “He loved you.”

They buried Finrod’s body and what was left of the ten companions. Then Lúthien took Beren’s hand in hers and led him out of there. And if Beren was changed, a little harder, a little less pure of thought and deed, Lúthien still loved him. He was still hers. And when he smiled at her she still felt like she’d come home.


	73. Greatness

Intermission: Greatness

Rístang remembered braving the swamps to track her grandparents down, full of a child’s curiosity to hear stories of distant lands. Her grandparents visited after the spring rains –the wilds their home, the stars and tree-canopy their only roof—the remainder of the year. She’d pack mushrooms in a napkin, sling a water-skin over her shoulder, and abandon her mother’s telian and the fishing village to walk on the wilder side of life. 

By the mark of other Sindar, her grandparents were considered strange. Rístang found them out gathering. They came when the Sirion ran low to net fish, crawfish, frogs, and snakes, and hunt wading birds in the marshes. Rístang’s mother allowed the indulgence because Rístang never retuned empty-handed. A basket of fish was a bounty upon her mother’s table with a child to feed, and only a crippled body with a lost leg and blind eyes to provide.

Rístang’s elder brother was a transitory presence in her childhood. He worked on the river boats, ushering supplies from Nargothrond to the distant North, and was seldom under their roof. Their bellies were never full unless Brother was home. 

Rístang grew, and her grandparent’s stories lost their magic as she perceived the theme of bitterness sunk deep in their words. Her visits thinned. Sometimes she’d think of her grandparents as ancient adders; their words full of poison as they criticized her brother’s betrayal of his people’s ways and sell-out to the greedy Golodhrim. Rístang had no counter but the disquiet in her heart, for she’d never set eyes on one of the Golodhrim. Their marshlands were poor, and held the southern tip of Nargothrond’s south-most province. Few Golodhrim bothered to come, and none planted roots. 

In Rístang’s twentieth year the world changed.

She had always been clever. Her eyes were smart, her mother would say. They could estimate the distance on a road with ease, and when she canoed the measurement to approaching boulders and rock walls sprang quickly to her tongue. 

She’d been assisting the local carpenter in exchange for a trading bead the day one of the province lord’s scouting parties rode through their insignificant village, and stopped to rest a lame horse. Rístang had never seen a horse before. 

The carpenter had been hired to mend the watermill, but the work was stalled. It would take two weeks to send for a proper millwright and have him canoe the distance to the village. They needed that mill; two weeks was too long a span to be without the village’s main source of income.

It was Rístang who solved the riddle; though at her tender years it took a great deal of persuasion and a heavy dose of desperation for the carpenter to heed the childish voice. But her solution worked. The waterwheel groaned to a start and the running stone began grinding again. The villagers made such a to-do over Rístang’s cleverness, they drew the eye one of the scout’s eyes, a Sinda in fine mail with gold coins in his purse and kind eyes.

Rístang was brought before him, her clothing little more than rags, her hair clean enough to shine in the sun like glass, but her naked toes buried in the dust and her fingernails grooved with dirt. He offered to bring her to Nargothrond City where she would have an education and wider opportunities. Her mother accepted.

When Rístang’s mother pressed her to her breast, she said: “Go now, my swift-eyed girl. Go _be_ someone. And never, ever come back to this misery.”

Rístang never went back. She wrote her mother, always careful to include any trade beads she could scrape together during her years of education, and more when she secured herself a position in the Engineers’ Guild. But her family was a distant part of her life now, nothing more than memory.

Her first months in Nargothrond had been like walking into an alien world. It wasn’t just how far behind on her studies she was, it was the way she dressed and talked; it was things so fundamental as to create a differing understanding of the world. 

Honor meant something else in the city where the codes of the Golodhrim ruled, and could be besmirched and lost in new ways. Property and ownership became something like gods, so sacred were Craftsman’s Rights to the Golodhrim. In the village, if a neighbor was out of barley, they would come into your telian and take a scoop from your stores, needing no permission. And when you needed thread for a patching you went into their home and took some. 

She had learned though. She forgot the rules of community and adopted the ones of individuals. But there was one lesson from her childhood she could never forget: poverty. There was a greediness about her, grasping for everything she could obtain; hounding any source of plenty, pumping it, terrified of its absence.

It wasn’t only the memory of concave bellies that had her mother sending her away with those words and into escape. It was the hopelessness. Poverty was desperation. She’d seen its vicious cycle play out with her mother. Poor choice piled on poor choice made in the desolation of her despair as she clawed against her fate. After a while she just stopped trying. She gave up, gave in, too tired and eroded to keep clinging to hope. She stopped whispering to the night that she were going to get out, and accepted that its oppressive yoke would be hers for the rest of her miserable life. 

Rístang was ambitious. Maybe it had started in a fishing village with her mother telling her to be someone, but it didn’t end there. She was full of naked hunger to prove her worth, and show the world that she was worthy of respect. She wanted someone to acknowledge she was a somebody.

The Fëanorion lord had looked at her and seen all the way down to her greedy roots. And then he’d smiled; smiled at her like he approved, like he knew. He’d seen potential in her, something worth cultivating, and for a time this had been enough to blind her to all else. But then the news of King Finrod’s death came with the escaped thralls of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, and the shine of Lord Curufin’s elegant hand offered to _her_ wore off. 

She knew the shape of shame upon her tongue, its slick blade. 

Gildor didn’t know what she’d done. He still smiled at her, believing them friends, thinking she’d come back into his life with purely altruistic motivations. But she felt the cut of shame’s blade every time she looked into his sweet face. 

This was the price of ambition. She wouldn’t forget, but nor would she let her mistakes cripple her. She would learn from them and move on from that foolish, hungry girl consumed with recognition. She couldn’t cut out the parts of herself still determined to be someone; but she could grow in discernment and wisdom.

When the Sinda of Doriath came to Nargothrond’s halls with a terse message from King Elu Thingol about his daughter, Rístang didn’t know her life was about to be up-heaved again. 

Everything was different after they’d sent King Finrod off to his death (and they had, no matter how they liked to paint it up with false colors). He was their sworn king, and they’d abandoned him. It was strange, thinking about those years before the Dagor Bragollach, before the War touched them. For many inhabitants of Nargothrond life had been idyllic. Now there was a perpetual staleness in the atmosphere. There were shame and fear in the shadows that lay heavy like a womb of sickness upon them. 

Into this womb of bile and shifty-eyes walked Thingol’s messenger. He stood, proud as a tree, the confidence of his high-birth riding his chin. The insolence of privilege was in his bones. His voice was the refined drawl of a noble when he relayed Thingol’s demand for the immediate release of his daughter, and the threat of war if the sons of Fëanor attempted to force her into marriage.

Curufin stiffened where he stood like a shadow behind Orodreth’s throne. Celegorm’s reaction was less subtle at the accusations. In a matter of moments the deck of political power was shuffled. Orodreth’s head rose slowly from the bowed posture it had adopted since Finrod put the crown on it. 

Orodreth looked up, and his face was the one of a general seeing the path to victory. He was no longer the king floundering in the sea of shadowy politics, struggling against rumors and side-deals; he was the general of a nation threatened by war. 

Orodreth rose. He looked so small standing before the heavy throne Finrod had dominated with the radiance of his personality. But Orodreth’s face wore the determination and confidence of a general understanding the battlefield before him.

Orodreth addressed the Sinda emissary frankly, telling him of Lúthien’s escape. Rístang never knew afterwards if it was intended on Orodreth’s part, but his next words were as well aimed as daggers: “I can only conclude that the assumption on King Thingol’s part anyone here in Nargothrond would force Princess Lúthien into marriage, is the result of some grave mistake of carelessness on the part of the one who wrote this rousing letter. After all,” he continued, overriding the first words of Curufin’s denial of doing anything such thing, “no one in Nargothrond wishes strife with our Sindar neighbors. It would be a woe unspeakable if a kinslaying occurred over a _misunderstanding._ ”

That was all it took. The shadow of Alqualondë crept into the room, and the tide of power rolled. Suddenly the fear foremost in everyone’s mind was not the threat of the North, but how perilously close they had come to another kinslaying over, yet another, ‘misunderstanding.’

By the end of the day, rumors were flying, and it no longer mattered how the Fëanorions tried to stop them up, a storm had been loosed, and nothing could hold back its waves. The backlash was fuelled by fear, but also shame and anger over the new perspective of manipulation. For surely it must be the Fëanorions’ fault they’d forsaken their king: Their minds had been poisoned. They’d been played by the ultimate players. They were not to blame.

But while these events were monumental for the fate of Nargothrond, Rístang’s own life-changer was personal. 

She needed to breathe free of the cloistering atmosphere buzzing like a hornet’s nest, so she went up to the surface to seen the sky. There were modest gardens open to public use terraced up the hill’s side. They were far enough away and upwind of the stables to avoid the smell, and in their higher levels a body could find a crisp breeze.

She found the emissary of Doriath there, lingering under a cheery tree. Its blushing peddles were falling, and the wind deposited a few in his coils of silver hair. Even in relaxation she could see he was a warrior. He had singing limbs. He rose as she intruded upon his sanctuary; he moved like he was molded from the finer stuff of the earth. 

“I did not mean to disturb you, lord,” she inclined her head, keenly aware of the inelegance of the movement next to his easy grace. 

She turned to go, but he called, “You are a Sinda? Stay a moment.” 

The words were spoken with a voice used to command, but her irritation was restrained when he patted the bench beside him, offering her a seat like an equal. She sat, her back straight as a lance.

He smiled at her, black eyes insouciant. It was the smile of a courtier. He wanted something, but she had known that the moment he’d called her over. “It is good to witness our kin being well-treated by the Golodhrim. One does hear things.” She said nothing, waiting for him to move passed the niceties. “Do you find life enjoyable here?”

“It is sufficient.” 

He cocked his head. “The people of Nargothrond must be grieved over King Felagund’s death. I understand he was well-loved.”

“As I am sure King Thingol is well-loved.” It was no business of his the discord and betrayal of the Nargothrondrims, any more then it was hers the rumors of discontent in Doriath. A spy did hear things though.

He smiled emptily. “Of course. And I am sure King Orodreth is as well.”

“He is the very best of lords.”

“It is fortunate Princess Lúthien attained her own release. It must have been a great strain on the people of Nargothrond to have the Kinslayers in your midst. But I think,” he leaned closer as in imparting privileged insight, “they will not be a burden upon you much longer.”

“That is glad tidings indeed, lord.”

He pulled back, looking at her. She knew she wasn’t playing the game flawlessly. She was tired. She’d wanted a bit of peace, not another round. He’d thought her a simple Sinda in her conservative attire boasting no expressive jewels or luxurious fabrics. He’d thought her an easy mine for insider information, eagerly spilling all for the honor of a great lord’s attentive ears.

“Forgive me, I have neglected my manners,” the lord took her hand. “I am Amdír, grandson of Elmo, son of King Elu Thingol.”

 _What an impressive lineage,_ she tried for sarcasm but even in the privacy of her mind she failed. A prince of the Sindar sitting under a shedding cherry tree with the village-girl born in a swamp. “Rístang.”

“Well met Rístang.” She liked the way he left it at that, no comment, even teasing, about the plainness of her address. “And what finds you out of those lovely halls and seeking sunshine?”

She made a soft noise in the back of her throat. “Me? What of yourself, lord? No secret councils to attend? No pressing business calling you back to Doriath?”

“Ah ah ah, you shall not evade me so easily!” He smiled like she’d done something entraining in deflecting the question. “You must have a story; everyone has a story. What is it you do? What brought you here to Nargothrond, or were you born in these halls?”

“Everyone may have a story, lord, but that does not save most from dullness.”

Amdír threw back his head and laughed. She blinked. She’d spoken drily, with no attempt at witticism. How strange this Sinda prince was. Maybe all the Sindar were like this; merry, eager to laugh. They had seen less of war and woe these last centuries, so perhaps it was so.

“Now I must know yours!” He rested his elbow on the back of the bench, stretching out like a silver cat. “Don’t hold me in suspense, have mercy!”

“I am sure there is nothing to tell.” Rístang meant to close her mouth and end it there. His eyes kept watching her, expectant. He had peach blossom eyes, alluring, pulling her in in the disappearing curve of their half lids. “I was not born here, but came for my education, and have remained since. I do not have any thrilling tales to tell. I am of the Engineers’ Guild, and the most exciting part of my life is building roads and bridges and the like.”

“You are an engineer?” He leaned forward, gaze sharpening on her face.

“Yes. Are they uncommon in Doriath? It does take a great deal of education—”

“Please!” Amdír held up his hand, laughing at her roused temper. “I meant no offence. I find you interesting that is all. Things are done differently here than in Doriath.” He tilted her a look. “And that is not me saying we do things better in Doriath. Indeed, much has grown stagnant.” His mood darkened.

“Things are not perfect here,” she found herself saying. “I do not believe they are anywhere.”

“Perfect? No.” Amdír agreed. “But better. Yes, that can be achieved. And _should_ be striven for.” His face lit, and she looked into a kindred spirit, one who hungered for more.

Amdír lingered in Nargothrond, sending his party on without him to report back to the king. He excused it, saying he’d not been outside the Girdle in centuries and wanted a chance to see the world. He told her, when she asked if Thingol would not mind, that his great-grandfather had never cared for him or his sibling Oropher, and would considered it no great hardship to be parted from Amdír for a time.

Amdír did not speak so plainly of his strained relationship with the king to the ears of a near-stranger. Rístang learned the initial reason why Amdír sought her out above all others, stayed in Nargothrond for her, and asked formally to court her: she was wholly divorced from the Sindar ladies he’d known all his sheltered, privileged life. She was _real_. No love verse that, and the fascination of the novel wasn’t enough to hold attention, much less a courtship. But while it began with the allure of the exotic, it solidified into more. He saw other things in her. He liked her intellect, but most, her hunger.

She did not love him when she accepted his courtship, but she did recognize an advantageous match. Amdír was offering her a life of more, and she grasped it with both hands.

She fell in love with him slowly. He was not perfect. He was as flawed as she, and his ambitions drove him to different unattractiveness of character than her own greed.

He was punitive. He was ever on the lookout for superiors (especially Thingol) in the wrong; looking to uncover neglect of even the most trivial order. Once she broke passed his court mask, she found he criticized Thingol about everything. There was not one decision Thingol made that Amdír did not think he could have made better.

Many of his ideas were sound, but the complaining was tiresome. Yet she understood him, as he did her. She learned of the root of his discontent, heard of Thingol’s many slights and injustices against Amdír and Oropher in preference of their cousin Celeborn who was Thingol’s favorite in every way. 

He painted his dream for her of ruling his own lands free of Thingol’s control and all the stagnated laws and traditions Doriath had built over the years. He dreamt of returning to a ‘purer’ form of existence, one the Wood-elves had never abandoned. Pieces of the dream sent her hackles rising and flying into a temper, and them both storming off until they’d cooled their heads enough to sit down and pick apart the dissonance. But there were other parts that set her heart leaping in her chest and the hunger pacing.

Their courtship was full of similar minds rubbing up against each other like cats, sometimes purring, sometimes scratching, but always swinging back into orbit about each other. It was like awakening from a gritty dream-world into a featherbed. 

Amdír would write the secrets of his heart between folds of paper fashioned into flowers or birds, and slip them into her fingers when they passed in the hall. It was a Sindarin tradition, but one only practiced by the upper-classes. She’d never expected to meet a soul akin to her own and have it want to cleave with hers. She knew, but for her mind, she brought little to the marriage table. 

Yet she did not doubt Amdír’s sincerity when he whispered in her ear as they lay pressed ribs to ribs: _Your body is my grassland; everything about you makes me breathe freer._

She felt the same. When she touched Amdír, she felt like she was rolling greatness under her fingertips. And when they kissed, she felt the tides pull and the gulls scream. She placed her hands on the spread of his chest, and watched them rise and fall like a ship on the breast of the sea, heading straight towards the rising sun.


	74. Chapter 60

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Signifies modified quotes from the Silmarillion

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 60

Celebrimbor twisted the ring. The silver band bedazzled, throwing back the lamplight in bolts of radiance. Dominating the crest was a fire-opal pulsing with a life all its own. Curufin had made it for him. Celebrimbor pressed his thumb into the fire-opal and felt the echo of the sliver of himself Curufin had infused with the forging. 

Celebrimbor fisted it in his hand. It was precious; it was the first and most likely last piece of beauty Curufin would ever forge this side of the sea. And the time he’d spent side-by-side in Nargothrond’s forges with Celebrimbor would be the last they passed thus.

The door opened as he’d known it would, and Curufin stepped in. There was an impatient look on his face, just the edge of harried. Most people would be showing more strain over being banished from a realm. 

Celebrimbor squeezed his fist tighter, wanting the shape of the ring to stamp itself into his flesh. Curufin’s voice echoed back to him from that first day he’d accompanied Celebrimbor to Nargothrond’s forges: “This quiet. It preys upon the mind, don’t you think? A body needs employment.”

Celebrimbor should have done more, should have stopped his father. Curufin had destroyed himself, and Celebrimbor had sat on his hands and let him.

“Quick, get your things together,” Curufin started right up. He didn’t ask if Celebrimbor was coming with them, never assumed for even a moment Celebrimbor might have a mind of his own. Celebrimbor would have pitied his father for the coming conversation if he wasn’t so busy concentrating on stopping his voice from shaking. “I am not coming.”

Curufin had marched over to Celebrimbor’s desk and started piling things together. The stacks were messy. Curufin was never messy. His father’s hands froze for one heartbeat, and then continued their work. “You will have to hurry. Celegorm is with Himrandir now. There is not time for our people to accompany us, Himrandir will meet us in Himring later, but I want you to come with me, so get your things.”

“No, Father. I am not coming. Not with you. Not with Himrandir. I am staying here.” Celebrimbor swallowed when Curufin turned sharply.

“Do not be ridiculous. Of course you are coming.” Just the slightest vibration in his voice, a flicker of strain on his face. Celebrimbor was watching for it, desperate for it. 

“Do you remember how I came to you with the necklace?” Celebrimbor stared at the disorderly piles on his desk rather than Curufin’s eyes.

“We do not have time—”

“I asked you to let it go. Do you remember? I asked you to forget about Nargothrond and building armies and power. I asked you to leave that night, go home. But you said no.” Celebrimbor clenched his hands tighter. “It was not about Finrod’s quest –well it was, but not—it was about you _choosing_ the Oath. No, not the Oath. But yes, because the Oath is all you—” Celebrimbor hated that he was making a mess of this. He could never get his words out right. “Finrod, his quest, you could have chosen to leave it alone. I know you could have. And Thingol’s daughter, gods, what were you and Uncle _thinking_.” Celebrimbor ran a hand through his braids. His father watched him, lips pressed so tightly together they were a knife slash across his face. 

Curufin turned away. He rested a hand, just the tips of his fingers, on the desk. “I see I have failed you. I have neglected your education. That you could doubt the necessity of our mission—”

Maybe for the first time in his life Celebrimbor cut his father off. He laughed. It was a wild, messy, painful sound. “Of course. I have not learned all my lessons on being the perfect Fëanorion yet. That is what all this is, just me being an ignorant child.” He’d never spoken to his father like this, but there was a forest fire that had been curling too long in his lungs, and it had to get out.

Curufin’s face closed even tighter, and he swept across the room like a coming ice-storm. “If you understood what it means to be a Fëanorion, you would understand why we took the Oath and why we _have_ to recover the Silmarils. You would understand why we could not suffer the Mortal’s quest in silence.”

Even now Curufin did not speak of Finrod. The closest they’d come to discussing Finrod was the day Celebrimbor gave his necklace to Curufin. Curufin’s words that day had kept the last thread tying them from snapping, they had kept Celebrimbor hoping there was something more underneath the obsession. Curufin had said: “Vengeance is action.” And Celebrimbor had understood the words falling in-between but left unsaid. Vengeance was the only way Curufin had left to mourn. Grief was a god Curufin could not slay, so he picked up vengeance instead, because to do nothing was surrender to despair. 

Curufin said now: “Our devotion makes us stronger. And one day we will be rewarded for it when reclaim the Silmarils.” 

Celebrimbor tried to look deep enough to make everything alright. It was in the grooves of Curufin where his heart lay. If he just looked _deeper_ , if he just…then maybe his father’s face wouldn’t be a stranger’s.

Or maybe he’d been deluding himself for a long time. He was given to blindness. But after the Kinslaying he’d had to believe his father had realized they’d made a mistake, gone too far, crossed a line they’d never, _never_ , cross again. The alternative was admitting he no longer knew the man his father had become, and all these glimpses of the man he’d loved were nothing but illusions.

Celebrimbor took a step back, away from Curufin, away from that fanatical light in his eyes. Away from destruction sucking him in like a black hole. Curufin stood in flames; they curled up his arms, his legs, wrapped about his ribs and breastbone. They consumed him. 

“No,” Celebrimbor took another step back. “Your obsession makes you weak. It is a weakness the Oath uses against you. You have lost yourself to its shadow. And I can no longer see my father.” 

Curufin pursued him. He clamped Celebrimbor’s arm in a fierce grip, anchoring him from leaving. “You are coming with me. Now get your things. Do as I say.”

Celebrimbor’s hopes were like flowers –fragile and withering. His father couldn’t, _wouldn’t_ , see how this was going to end. “I love you Father, but I no longer know you. I will not go down this path with you.”

Curufin’s fingers convulsed against his flesh, digging, digging, digging (don’t leave me). “You are of Fëanor’s blood; he is a part of you. You can’t just walk away!”

Curufin had said all the wrong things. This wasn’t about _Fëanor!_

Celebrimbor wrenched Curufin’s hand away. “I was of _your_ blood. I am of my own now. I will not follow you. Ever again.”

Curufin did not reach out to man-handle him to the door; he did not lash out with ice and pain and words like poison. He said only one word: “Celebrimbor.”

Curufin’s voice cradled his name. Celebrimbor swayed forward, just a heartbeat of weakness, of longing, before he slammed down on it. He couldn’t do this, not again. He couldn’t drag himself after Curufin, desperate for one more moment of almost-love. He couldn’t go through another year, another day, another minute of doubts and ‘does he still love me’s?’ He couldn’t lay himself down every night hoping tomorrow would be better, would be different, would be how it once was. 

His hands shook. His knees felt weak, but he got his body to function and turned his back on Curufin. He couldn’t look at his father, couldn’t watch him leave, couldn’t let Curufin see his face fold into itself.

Curufin didn’t touch him. Celebrimbor heard the slow sound of boots walking to the door, the sound of the door opening, the sound of a pause (no don’t, just leave, just leave, let this be over!). “Know that I will always… if you should…I will be in Himring.” The sound of the door closing.

Celebrimbor’s hand hurt. He opened his fist. The shape of Curufin’s ring was branded into his palm. 

*

It had been a mistake, lingering in Nargothrond, Celegorm realized this now. They should have ridden out with the supporters they’d harvested directly after Finrod left for his quest when their power was at its height. But Curufin had believed they could play the long game and hold Nargothrond until Maedhros consolidated his alliances and called Beleriand to battle. 

Orodreth was the problem, the reason they couldn’t leave Nargothrond in his hands. How could they be sure Orodreth would march Nargothrond’s army to war in the North? They couldn’t. So they had lingered, thinking to ensure Nargothrond’s continued support. And now they had nothing to show for years of labor. Not one of the Elves they’d worked so hard to cultivate would follow them into banishment. 

Celegorm didn’t believe those fair-weather Nargothrond supporters would join Himrandir when he led Curufin and Celegorm’s people from Nargothrond. Celegorm wished they’d never gone to Nargothrond. 

Curufin rode at his side, Huan ran on the other. There should have been another rider on Curufin’s left. There should have been braids flinging out, a back strong as Father’s had been, muscles refined from years of forge-work. There should have been eyes dark as dusk meeting his over Curufin’s head as they both silently worried over Curufin’s silence. But there was nothing and no one. Celegorm had no eyes to share his worry with because Celebrimbor wasn’t there.

When they spied the two forms wandering like dreamy trees grown side-by-side towards the sun, it was both furry swallowing him and relief that he finally had an outlet for the rage. He was going to make Lúthien Tinúviel pay for using him like her plaything. 

Curufin saw them too, and without a word, set his horse into a gallop. His face was terrifying. It was one step over the line of madness. It was Father’s face the last time Celegorm saw it before Fëanor charged after Morgoth’s fleeing hordes.

“Get Lúthien before she weaves a spell!” Celegorm had to save Curufin from himself. He had to swallow his own vengeance against Lúthien and put himself as a shield between Curufin, Beren, and insanity. If Curufin got his hands on that Mortal, the one who’d led Finrod to his death, Celegorm feared it wouldn’t be death Curufin’s delivered. It would be the soulless games of an Orc.

Maybe Curufin realized how close he teetered to something unspeakable and irreversible, because when they caught up to the pair he grabbed Lúthien, flinging her over the front of his saddle. But then everything when wrong. Celegorm had been intent on riding Beren into the ground, but just before his horse reached him, Beren leapt with an impressive lung of power and agility, and grabbed Curufin by the hood of his cloak, unseated him from the horse.

“Curufin!” Celegorm swerved his horse, dirt clots flying out under the digging hooves. Beren and Curufin wrestled on the ground, but something was wrong. Curufin wasn’t _winning_. 

Celegorm had almost reached them, almost had that _filthy_ Mortal by the neck to choke him like he was choking Curufin, when Huan was suddenly between him and his little brother who needed him. Huan’s teeth bared and he used his bulk to terrify the horse. It reared, but Celegorm kept his seat. 

“Huan! Get away!” The horse reared again, completely out of control. But Huan didn’t move. He wasn’t going to let Celegorm pass. He was going to let Curufin die. 

Curufin’s hands scrabbled against Beren’s fingers pressed into his windpipe; there was blood on his temple. Celegorm leapt dangerously from the maddened horse, uncaring for his own safety. Curufin thrashed on the ground under Beren, needing his brother to save him. Celegorm tried to run passed Huan because surely, surely Huan wouldn’t actually—

Huan’s body slammed into his, sending him stumbling and falling onto his face, close enough to see the way Curufin’s was turning a terrifying shade of red. “Curufin!” Celegorm was blind, crawling, stumbling, a thousand worlds ending in terror, terror, terror in the span of seconds. 

A mighty paw pressed into his back, pushing him into the ground like a mountaintop between his shoulder blades. But the weight was nothing, _nothing_ , compared to the one crushing his breastbone until he couldn’t breathe. Curufin’s hands clawed, eyes wild and desperate and searching; his legs kicking slower, weaker….

“Beren!” Lúthien pulled at Beren’s shoulders, her slight form deceptive as she broke Beren’s single-minded hold. “Don’t kill him!

“He would have killed us!” Beren’s face was flushed, hands working at his sides as if remembering the way a neck felt between them and wanting it back.

“I will not let them destroy you!” She touched his wrathful cheek. “Beren do not let yourself fall as they have. You are worth a thousand of them.”

Curufin coughed on the ground while they were lost in each other’s eyes. Celegorm wanted to rip those eyes out, leaving only black holes, and feed his trophies to the crows.

Curufin tried to go for Angrist, his fingers weak. Celegorm was proud his brother still had the strength to fight back. Beren’s hand clamped around Curufin’s wrist before he could win the knife from its sheath. Beren twisted Curufin’s hand cruelly, grabbing the other to pin them above her head. Curufin bucked under him, trying to throw him off. His movements grew stronger, he was giving Beren a fight, but then Lúthien’s hands pressed into Curufin’s temples.

Celegorm could do nothing, trapped under one he’d once called friend before this ultimate betrayal (a thousand times worse than Aredhel, then _anyone_ ). He couldn’t even pull his sword out, pressed as he was with his belly in the ground. He would have used it on Huan if it meant saving Curufin.

Curufin’s eyes rolled back, face whitened, the vein in his forehead protruded, and when he snarled it was the cousin of a scream. The witch held her hands there, on Curufin’s face, as Curufin writhed under Beren like an injured animal dying slowly, painfully.

“Get off him! Get off him! I will kill you!” Lúthien met Celegorm’s eyes over Beren’s shoulder. There was no pity there, only the memory of a prison passed off as a chamber, weeks locked away without the wind or the breath of trees, and dancing-legs bound by stone walls.

Beren took Curufin’s cloak and the pouch of healing herbs on his belt. He took the sword Fëanor had forged for Curufin in Valinor. He took Angrist from Curufin’s waist where it always, _always_ , hung: a testament to something so far above the Mortal’s comprehension. 

There was a flash like a blinding white fist as the cloak was tugged roughly away. Lúthien’s hands finally released Curufin from the spell. They followed the light back into the top of Curufin’s tunic, reaching in to pull out the chain the star-glass hung upon. She snapped it. Light purer than the stars, holy, sanctified by the memory of fire and bottled by Celebrimbor’s skill, blazed in an unworthy hand.

Curufin’s eyes slit open. His lips shook. Not with tears, but the aftershocks of magic. His eyes didn’t quite focus, but they were staring at the star-glass in Lúthien’s hands. Then, as if drawing from a secret well of strength, he surged up, hands grabbing for his most prized possession, the worth of which could not be measured anymore than the weight of light could be.

Beren kicked Curufin in the ribs, and Lúthien pulled away, out of reach of those desperate hands. “This belongs in the hands of those unstained by filth.” She slipped the star-glass into her pocket and the world went ugly.

Beren threw Curufin away from them like a piece of trash. Celegorm could not pick his brother up out of the dirt. His hands burned from where they dug into the earth, grit and sharp rocks slicing his palms. The nails on Huan’s paw had sunk through Celegorm’s tunic, scoring into the flesh of his back from the violence of his struggles.

Beren grabbed the reigns of Curufin’s horse. “You can walk back your _noble_ kin. It might teach you to turn your mind to worthier use, but I doubt it. As for you horse, I shall keep it for Lúthien’s service, and it may be accounted happy to be free of such a master.”*

Curufin rose slowly. When he gained his feet, he looked haunted and fell as Fëanor had in the end, in spite of the finger-marks glaring red and bruising about his neck. “Go hence then, unto a swift and bitter death.”*

Huan took his paw off Celegorm and walked over to his new masters. Celegorm did not look at him. He’d never known a hound named Huan, never called any by that name friend. If there had once been a time such a hound had nestled in his heart, beloved as his own kin, then it had been utterly expunged.

Celegorm’s horse had quieted enough for him to mount. He walked it to Curufin, keeping Lúthien and Beren in the corner of his eye as Lúthien mounted her stolen horse with the stolen star-glass in her pocket and the stolen Angrist and Fëanorion steel-blade about her lover’s waist. He waited until Curufin mounted behind him before he sought his brother’s intentions. There was no question that this wasn’t over.

He reached his hand back, brushing his brother’s thigh. Curufin touched his wrist, and pressed his mouth against Celegorm’s ear. “Ride.” 

Celegorm urged the horse into a smooth walk as he felt Curufin’s hand slip under his right thigh and begin unlacing his bow from the saddle. Curufin slid one of the arrows from the quiver on Celegorm’s back. Celegorm didn’t look behind him as he felt Curufin twist to take aim. Curufin released the arrow, but snarled as the sound of wood snapping between jaws was heard. With swift fingers, he strung another arrow and let it fly. This one hit by the sound of the Mortal’s cry and Lúthien’s: “Beren!”

Curufin was reached for a third arrow when the horse screamed in terror, and a growl like a wolf came from their back. Celegorm turned to look as the horse reared, and Curufin had to abandon the arrow to clasp his hands about Celegorm’s waist. 

There was a great hound pursuing them. Its coat was white and shaggy and it stood almost as tall as a horse. But Celegorm did not know it. He did not.

“Get this cursed horse under control!” Curufin put his hand on the hilt of Celegorm’s sword to draw as the great beast bore down on them.

“I can’t.” And Celegorm didn’t mean the horse. He placed his hand over Curufin’s, holding him from unsheathing the sword. He didn’t know this hound chasing them like a thunderstorm, magnificent devastation, but while there was no name for the animal, he couldn’t bear to see that white coat splashed red. “I can’t.

The horse bolted in terror, and Celegorm did nothing to stop their flight.

There was silence pressed against his back, as if the one whose heat he felt slotted against his thighs and hips was nothing but a ghost. He couldn’t ride on without looking at Curufin’s face, so once the hound abandoned its chase, Celegorm pulled the horse to a stop and dismounted.

Curufin dismounted stiffly after. Celegorm looked at the marks on Curufin’s neck. He shouldn’t have cared if that white fur had turned red. He shouldn’t have cared. 

Curufin stared back the way they’d come. There was desolation in his eyes. And Celegorm knew he’d failed his brother in the worst possible way. It wasn’t the missed revenge; this failure went much deeper and further back than that. He’d failed to save Curufin from himself. Failed a long, long time ago.

His lungs labored. It felt like he was trying to pull air through ocean water, and all he got was a mouth-full of salt. He reached out to the brother drifting, drowning, slipping away from him. 

He didn’t expect Curufin to allow the touch, so he wasn’t surprised when Curufin jerked away. “Get off!”

Curufin spun, legs eating up the ground. He paced like he was a heartbeat from breaking into a run, a line in the dirt away from exploding into a million pieces. “Was if so hard, was it so fucking hard to do one thing right!” Celegorm was used to arguing, but this time was different. “Do you realize what your pathetic, petty love for that disloyal _animal_ has done!”

“If our revenge means so much to you, then by all means, go back,” Celegorm swept his hand out to the horse. “Go get yourself choked to death. Or maybe that witch will have pity on you again.”

“I hate you,” Curufin snapped out the words as if he wanted to slaughter them with his teeth. Celegorm’s breath turned to gravel in his lungs. “You are a pathetic, weak, sniveling failure! I hate you. I hate you! I _hate_ you!” Curufin’s nails tore into his own face, scratching bloody lines into the skin. “ _I hate you!_ ” Celegorm watched in horror as his brother brought his wrists up to his mouth and started tearing into the flesh with his teeth.

“Curufin.” He took a staggering step towards Curufin, reaching out again, hoping he could catch the creature devouring itself with self-hate before it eluded him again. This time his hand touched solid skin and bone and flesh. And then he was catching Curufin between his fingers like a tapestry unraveling, but his fingers couldn’t sew him back together fast enough to stop the destruction. Curufin folded into himself like he would disappear.

“Father, Father,” Curufin’s hands twisted in the empty hollow of his collarbone, fisted in his tunic, right where the star-glass had always lain. “They look Father.” Celegorm dug his fingers into Curufin’s ribs, his shoulder, stuffed his face against Curufin’s blood-crusted temple. He’d never let go. “Sorry, Father, sorry, so sorry.” 

“Shhh.” Celegorm wanted to stab the sky. He wanted to murder the Earth. He wanted to tear Time apart, unmake the world until he was back in Valinor again before the world broke. Father would be there with his smile like the galaxy, and Maedhros with clean eyes, and Amrod and Amras before they learned a different use for their hunting skills, and Celebrimbor with a smile like honey in his mouth before he had to start stumbling after Curufin for scraps of what should have been a feast of love. Curufin would be there, the Curufin he remembered, the one before he uprooted himself to become some twisted shadow of Fëanor, one that had all the smiles on backwards because Celegorm wasn’t sure Curufin even remembered who Fëanor was anymore.

“Little Fist?” Curufin looked up at him from where he huddled in Celegorm’s arms, fingers still digging into the empty place on his chest. Curufin’s eyes were transparent as the first lie he ever told as a child. “I want Little Fist.”

“I am sorry. He is not...” Celegorm was hoping for self-erosion. 

And then it was Curufin’s turn to say sorry; sorry to ears that couldn’t hear, sorry until it bled, sorry until he burst open and salt ravaged his eyes.

Celegorm had not seen Curufin cry since Father died. He clung to Curufin’s shaking frame as he kept asking and asking for his Little Fist, for his father, but no one but Celegorm was coming. Celegorm had seen Curufin angry enough to spit blood; he’d seen him snarling and sliding malicious words like blades between ribs. He’d seen Curufin rage and hurl furniture against walls, and scream curses until his throat tore open. Celegorm had thought those were Curufin’s only way of crying left. 

The choking on tears and ragged, hyperventilating breaths had to stop eventually. Celegorm hadn’t let Curufin go, and somewhere in the middle Curufin had clung back. But when the storm-doors closed again and Curufin lay like a rag doll in his arms, limp as a body devoid of its soul, Celegorm wished the frightening storm back.

Curufin said, like the sickening crack of dove wings crunching underfoot: “He is never coming back, is he? He was the only thing I ever did right in this world and I never told him. I never told him he was perfect from the moment— He was mine. He was mine and I lost him.”


	75. Chapter 61

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 61

Year 489 of the First Age, Taur-nu-Fuin (Forest of Darkness), Dorthonion

It was there, waiting for him, across the vast plain of Anfauglith: Angband rose from the defiled land like a rotten tooth. 

A storm screamed in the night sky. He screamed back. He screamed until the memories he hoarded in his ribs were released enough to breathe again.

His hand (the only one he had left) clung to the tree trunk. He hunkered against its pitiless bark as the winds abused him. The lightning hurt his eyes after the familiarity of the dark. He wanted to shove his face in the dirt and hide from the sky.

His limbs felt foreign with the free-air against them. They shook like a puppet’s stings in the hands of a sadistic master. His body was a burden of destruction. Its crooked limbs had run upside-down because he’d forgotten how to run after years of shackles biting into his ankles (they didn’t need free legs to mine the shafts). His flesh felt like one immeasurable wound that would never heal. The bruises might fade from black to purple to yellow, but the sensitivity would remain: the rotten images of flesh memory. 

His knees pressed into his boney chest, the skin of his hollow belly wrinkling. Rain pounded him, but it didn’t make him feel whole and new again. It made him cold and wet, and shivering like a snake caught in winter’s frost.

He turned off his mind, the way he did _back there_ , in that place he wasn’t going to think about, wasn’t going to turn his head to search for looming on the horizon like it would forever loom in his dreams. He blanked his mind, stuffed himself down, and snuffed out his light (they couldn’t find him now; he didn’t exist). He rocked against the brittle grass, cheek pressed into the harsh bark of the tree like the breast of his mother (dead, dead, dead). He began his chant, the one he used _back there_ after a whipping or something worse. He said Finduilas’ name over and over again like a prayer. 

He knew a girl named Finduilas once. She had eyes like home. They were going to get married. He remembered the names of their children. The ones he’d been dreaming about for years before—

Their son’s name was Túranno, and his hair was copper as autumn leaves. When he dreamed about him, it was like looking back on his childhood with Gelmir, for there was always laughter in the dreams. Their daughter’s name was Thóriel, only it was also Neithan. There was something different about her face, dampened, but he thought her grim mouth precious and wanted to hug all the sadness out of her eyes. But that was where the dreams turned confusing, because why would he name his daughter Neithan: The Wronged? Then he remembered he had no children, though they seemed real enough to breathe. 

He knew a girl named Finduilas once. She’d pumped sunlight through her veins. They used to cling to each other, in love, but a cloud had come to shadow her sunlight and he grew anxious of her leaving, her eye wandering. He’d have to catch it, to make sure it hadn’t left. It used to be her eyes catching his too, brushing like sweet kisses as they met, and sliding away again, reassured and blushing. 

This girl he knew, she’d changed. But not him. He’d still wanted to sail through her seas. 

He ground his eye sockets into his knees, and suffocated the memories with pain. That was good, pain was good; it was an anchor in the dark. No, that wasn’t right. Pain made him scream in the dark, made him beg and beg and beg and—

His hand (the only one he had left) clawed in the grass, knotting it between fingers broken so often they’d forgotten how to fit back together again. He held onto the grass as the storm and memories lashed him, because if he let go he’d fall right off the Earth. 

He had not prayed for deliverance from _back there_. He did not believe The One reached down and ordered the lives of the Children, not even to save them from torment. He heard other thralls praying in the pits. Unceasingly. Obsessively. Until their throats cracked open and their parched lips bled. 

Everything had a purpose in the Symphony. Even his brother’s murder before his eyes, even watching his father and mother cut down on the steps of Angband, their eyes burning with the light of the Two Trees and vengeance, vengeance, vengeance. 

In the Darkness of the pits, Gelmir walked beside him, with his mother and father. They had not abandoned him. They pointed out the small wonders of beauty to carry him through the pain.

The Orcs would drive the thralls deep into the mine shafts, chained in work gangs, bellies cramping, buckets and picks in their hands. They would dig into the flesh of Arda and pull out beauty from darkness. Unrefined gold and gems, the cool breathing of ore in their palms. They would walk through wonders down there in the belly of the Earth. Cave walls glittered in the torchlight as if mapped by a million stars. 

He would touch white webs of fungi and marvel at the depth of The One’s creation. The thralls endured the impossible. They fell to bleeding knees, only to rise again and again. He witnessed the resilience of The One’s creation: Arda; the masterpiece he gifted to his children. He had wrapped himself around his Estel in the Darkness, but that did not mean he had crawled out of it whole.

He couldn’t remember how he’d fallen against this tree. He couldn’t remember how he’d lost himself in this forest of gloom and decay. The circumstances of his escape were hazy in his mind, blotted out by terror and panic and the pain from the stump where his hand was removed because he couldn’t crawl out of torment without sawing off the limb shackling him there.

The wind violated his used-up flesh, and the rain beat holes in his bowed shoulders. Into the crook of his elbow, where his breath puffed the only heat in the world, with a voice like rust he begged: “Not like this, not like this!” And then, like the scraping of nails over stone, screeching and utterly unbeautiful: “Show me the stars one last time!” 

The sky was cloaked. He hadn’t allowed himself to die in the Darkness, but his Estel was not for this life. It was for the souls awaiting his coming in the Halls of Dead. He would see his brother again, just as he’d told Finrod all those years ago.

His exhausted body lay down in a belly of mud and harsh grasses and sharp rocks. He closed his eyes and did not expect to ever wake. There were only so many times an Elf could keep hauling himself to his knees before even these gave out.

His dreams were dark. He wanted to find the surface but was locked in memories. Then a woodland swam into his dream. He smelt cool moonlight on his skin and heard the peace in the deepest parts of a forest. A voice called him out of the Darkness.

He opened his eyes. The storm had passed and the smell of rain lingered in the air, but the grass under his fingers did not slip like re-birth through their tips. There could be no renewal in this blackened land rooted within Morgoth’s reach. 

An Elf crouched over him, a mighty black bow in his hands. Wet hair plastered against the Elf’s face, mud splattered all over his cloak and tunic; his boots were positively skinned in filth. He looked like a downed rat. He looked like magic. The stars were diamonds set into black lace, haloing the Elf’s silver-head. 

“Friend, you hurt.” He was frozen in the dark, and the Elf’s voice pierced like the warmth of summer into winter’s domain. “Here,” the Elf dug into his pack, pulling out something wrapped in leaves. “I have some lembas, take some and regain your strength.”

He reached out and took the offered food as if in a dream, for surely this creature of starlight could not be sitting here with him in this rotting forest far into the Enemy’s lands. He brought the waybread to his cracked lips and took a bite. His tongue struggled with it, feathery and airy though the bread was. 

The Elf saw him choke down the first bite, and offered a water-skin. He stared at the water-skin. This was a dream. He took it, swallowing huge gulps of water clear as rain.

“I am called Beleg Cúthalion. What is your name, friend?”

This was how he knew this was a dream: the Elf had no disgust in his eyes and his hand did not linger on his sword hilt. He knew the fate of thralls. They were killed on-sight rather the risk planted spies from the Enemy. The escapees of Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s fall were the only exception to this rule he had witnessed since the Exiles first understood that the loved ones and friends come back from Morgoth’s shadow were not a mercy from The One, but a curse.

He did not know his exact appearance, but he had lived long enough as an animal, driven by whips and knifes and something worse to know his form was ruined. He saw too well in the dark to pretend his eyes wouldn’t have mutated. More Orc than Elf now.

He turned his face away, pressing it into his cramped knees. This dream was an agony, a thousand times worse than reality, for it taunted him with what he could no longer have.

“Friend, will you not speak to me?” A hand brushed his shoulder and he cried out, shocked at the touch, mind flashing to a hundred others cruel and ugly.

Beleg withdrew his hand. “Forgive me. I did not mean to upset you.”

He stared at the Elf. Beleg’s skin was made of stardust, eyes the quiet waters of a forest pool. His hummingbird-bones trembled, but he answered, “I was once Gwindor, son of Guilin, son of Fingon. Now I am nothing. And you are a dream.”

Beleg’s eyes were lakes of compassion. “Well met, Gwindor son of Guilin. I am no dream.”

“You must be. Why would an Elf come here, to this land of death?” He pressed his cheek into his kneecap. “You must go from here quickly if you are real. For Orcs and wolves patrol these lands. This night I saw a great company pass, and they had a captive with them, a Man, tall as the Men of the Hills of Hithlum.” 

“Ai!” Beleg sprang to his feet. “But this is the very one I seek! Túrin son of Húrin, for whom I would walk into Angband itself to see him free again! How long ago did they pass? It might be I can yet catch them before they breach the Iron Gates.” 

“No!” He pushed to his knees, grabbing at Beleg’s hand, unheeding of his own hideousness in the power of his distress. “You must flee, or that Man’s fate will be yours as well! You do not know, you _cannot_ know what—” his hand convulsed and he released the Elf. “You must not go _back there_ , no, no, you must not!”

It seemed now that this was no dream but a nightmare, and because it was an unwinding tale of horror, he knew it to be real. This Elf was flesh and bone. Flesh and bone that would soon be chained and whipped and suffer unspeakable things.

“I may be heading into the anguish you know,” Beleg said softy. “But I must go all the same. Túrin is…I would suffer all the years of Arda a thrall if it meant Túrin was spared this fate.” Beleg’s face was transformed by love, the flesh of his _hröa_ pulled aside to reveal the steadfast goodness and loyalty of his _fëa_. 

A feeling ignited deep in Gwindor’s skeleton, down all the way to the bones rotted by memory. Hope spiked through his chest and beat against his mind in wings of flame. Not the hope of a successful rescue or the down throw of the Shadow, this was the deeper hope of Estel.

Beleg had brought all the music back into the world. The windows flung open and Gwindor could breathe again. It was like Beleg held out a hand to him, and taking it, Gwindor’s shredded knees could bear his weight once more.

“We must be quick,” he climbed with difficulty to his feet, “and I have no weapon to aid you. But come with you I shall.”

Beleg’s eyes widened and Gwindor had to look away, for surely there was nothing left in this depleted skeleton for Beleg to look upon him like that, as if he were some wonder. Beleg pulled twin knifes from his gauntlets, small but finely made, and held them out to him. “I would consider it an honor, Prince Gwindor. I remember you from the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. I remember the way the Enemy’s forces fled before your vengeance, and trembled with fear as the swords of Nargothrond cut down the guards at Morgoth’s door.” 

Beleg reached out and touched him carefully on the shoulder, as if approaching a wild animal. Gwindor found he could bear the touch, though he wanted to fold into himself and remove himself from the world so that Beleg’s beauty would not stain itself upon his skin. “But more than all that,” Beleg said fiercely, “I would fight beside the escaped thrall Gwindor who would walk back under the Shadow of Angband, risk a return to a horror only one who has known it can truly comprehend, and all for the sake of a stranger.”

Gwindor dropped his eyes. Beleg was mistaken, he had no bravery left. He was already trembling from the mere memory of Angband. But he lifted his right-hand and took the offered knife from Beleg’s palm. He let his ragged sleeve fall away from his left. “I can use but one. I fear I will be of little use on this venture, but I shall try not to dishonor myself.”

Beleg’s fingers slipped down from his shoulder to his thin arm. They encircled the wrist of his stump. “There will be no disgrace. Not even if you turn back, my friend. Come,” Beleg turned a face sharp and raw as a hunting wolf’s to the north, “we have Orcs to slay.”

*

Túrin screamed with the force of a tsunami behind his lungs. His fingers clawed into his eyes as if he could erase the sight of Beleg’s murdered body from his irises. His grief was so all-consuming he could not even find the release of tears to comfort himself. He was stricken to the soul, and after his throat closed-up he sat there, cradling Beleg’s body, as unresponsive as a dead man. How could Gwindor blame Túrin for killing the goodness from the world when Túrin already knew what he’d done? 

Gwindor had followed Beleg out of that dread forest until their destination heaved up before them. The iron teeth of Angband dominated the Northern horizon like the leering smile of a rapist. Gwindor’s heart was a fleeing rabbit in his chest, skinned alive. His courage almost deserted him as the memories beat against the fences he’d put up to keep them out, keep himself walking and breathing lest his knees fall out and his lungs cave-in. 

Then Beleg’s hand settled on his domed shoulders, and it was like The One walked beside him. He found the courage to pick up his feet and walk back down the path toward nightmares.

When the company of Orcs and wolves halted to make camp on the plains before entering the colossal gates of Angband, Gwindor thought the Great Symphony had written them one last chance to rescue the Adan. When the storm swept out of the west, he found a stalwart smile on his lips. Beleg slew the wolf guards and became Túrin’s savior like he was Gwindor’s, and it seemed the power of the Light laughed in the sea of Darkness, defiant and blazing.

The moon fell from the sky when Beleg Cúthalion died. 

Gwindor had known him only a day, but Beleg had rearranged his whole life. Beleg had kissed Estel into his skin and pumped strength into his limbs, and made Gwindor believe that there might be a life worth living after Angband. Beleg had been a star-spirit tumbled down to Earth, burning with their radiance. He’d touched Gwindor’s soul, pouring friendship and acceptance over him, and Gwindor would never forget.

Gwindor took Túrin’s hand, guiding the husk of the Adan, and together they dug a grave. The earth they laid Beleg into was black with malice, and groaned under the weight of unnumbered tears. Túrin laid the great yew-wood bow Beleg had slain a thousand Orcs with beside the stiffening body. Gwindor arranged the silver hair around Beleg’s face, wiped the blood and dirt from his cheeks. Then they began scooping the dirt back into the hole with their hands.

Beleg should have been laid to rest on a knoll in the heart of a forest where the sunlight shifted through leaves, spinning the world gold, and white flowers ringed the grave until the world broke open. Instead his body would rot in a bed of sickness and spite.

When Beleg’s body had been buried deep enough the wolves would not dig it up to feast upon, Gwindor placed Beleg’s black sword (the one Túrin had killed him with) into Túrin’s hands. His heart shook with compassion for Túrin. He knew with intimacy the weight of carrying the blame of a loved one’s death. He had born it for years after he’d watched, powerless, as Gelmir was chopped apart –slowly—before his eyes, and his rage had led his mother and father to their deaths. 

“Take this and let it drink vengeance against Morgoth. For it was Morgoth’s evil that killed Beleg, Túrin, and no fault of yours. Beleg loved you. He would not have you blame yourself for his death, anymore than he would have blamed you had he been captured and endured a curler fate.”

Túrin’s fingers wrapped around the sword’s hilt, but he did not speak. Beleg was gone, and the light with him. But Gwindor had a reason to live, and it was Túrin. 

Túrin stared into the distance, sightless, as lifeless as Gwindor had been before Beleg found him. If Gwindor were not here, Túrin would have been killed in the numbness of his grief. If Gwindor had never endured Angband’s horrors, Beleg would have never stumbled upon him in the wilderness, Gwindor never would have followed Beleg on his quest, maybe Beleg would even now be headed in chains alongside Túrin into pits of horror beneath the Earth’s teeth if Gwindor’s weak hand had not slain the sole Orc they’d roused spiriting Túrin away.

Gwindor clutched Estel to his breast, rose to his feet, slung the pack of Beleg’s lembas across his hunched shoulders, took Túrin by the hand, and set his ravaged face south. He would protect Túrin, lead him, and care for him until Túrin awoke to the world again.

Long they wandered though darkened lands, dodging Orc patrols and sniffling wolves, hiding in charred thickets and slugging through oily streams. Weeks passed, for every time Gwindor sought to break out of the Enemy’s lands, they came against the might of the front-lines. Túrin was his burden though all this, but one he never begrudged. 

Túrin was near catatonic, following Gwindor’s gently urging hands, but having no will of his own. Gwindor led Túrin as they walked in the day, and fed him lembas when they broke their fasts. He bathed Túrin in the unclean springs, and assisted Túrin in the most basic of bodily functions. He laid Túrin on the ground at night, spread the solitary blanket over both their shivering bodies, and cradled Túrin like his child when Túrin tossed in the grip of nightmares. 

He took to talking to Túrin. He’d never forgotten the sound of voices, for there had been other thralls suffering beside him in the pits, but simple freedom to speak when he wished had long since been stripped from him. Now he reclaimed it. He spoke to Túrin of Nargothrond’s beauty, its glory of old when Finrod still sat upon the throne and their hearts had not known shameful fear. He spoke to Túrin of Finduilas; and the more he spoke of her, the more he remembered and longed for her, and she became again more than just a girl he’d known once upon a time. (Of his family, his brother, Gwindor did not speak. His throat was a desert.) 

He spoke so often of Nargothrond and Finduilas, that when Túrin finally awoke beside the glass waters of Eithel Ivrin and wept out his grief over Beleg’s death, Gwindor offered the comfort of Nargothrond to him, saying they could go there together. He allowed himself to hope for something he’d not believed possible before he met Beleg. He hoped for acceptance from his own people, of a life renewed in Nargothrond. He would take Túrin there, and he’d look upon Finduilas again and met old friends, and discover if there was a life after Angband.

*

Gwindor stumbled as the guard shoved him. He thought he would humiliate himself by falling on his face, but he tripped into Túrin’s arms. Túrin caught him and snapped heated words at the guards. The guard who’d given them the small mercy of cutting their bonds before throwing them into a cell, looked away, but the others slapped self-righteous words back. 

Gwindor rubbed his wrist with his gruesome stump, and closed his eyes against the remembered shame of his violent reaction to the feel of his arms bound against his back. Memories had slunk through the bottom of his fenced-mind, and suddenly it wasn’t Elven guards tying his hands.

“We are merciful to let you live, thrall.” Gwindor struggled to keep his shoulders set against the disgust in the Elven voice. “The king will rule on your claims. You await his pleasure.” The cell door banged shut, the rattling of keys came, and then the turning of a lock. 

He’d declared himself: Prince Gwindor, son of Guilin, Lord of the Andram Province of Nargothrond. They had not believed him, not even the ones among the border patrol he’d recognized, having served with them in years past. Not one had known his face. 

Túrin’s arm tightened about his waist and carefully lowered him to the straw-carpeted stones. They were in Nargothrond again, and Gwindor had never felt further away from home. Túrin’s fingers came up to tenderly brush a strand of limp, gray hair from Gwindor’s eyes. 

“Let me fix this for you,” Túrin said softly. “You would not want to meet your betrothed looking like a wild man.” Túrin gave him a smile, but it was sorrowful as the lilting notes of his every word, as if a mourning dove were trapped in his breast. 

Gwindor submitted to the fingers twining through his brittle hair, trying to braid it into something more acceptable, but it was a hopeless task. Túrin was stubborn though, and wouldn’t give up until he’d woven something resembling the warrior braids of a Doriath March-warden into his hair.

“They should not have treated you like that,” Túrin said next to his ear, fingers working.

Gwindor was relieved he couldn’t see Túrin’s face. He didn’t want pity. Nor did he want anymore naïve optimism. “I should not have hoped for different. The guards were merely following the letter of the law. Indeed, if I had not claimed to be a lord, they would have killed me there in the wild, and none would have blamed them.”

Túrin pulled too tightly, and Gwindor hissed. “If it had been _my_ —” The words dried up. The word ‘father’ fell like a sawed off limb onto the bed of silence they both stared down at.

Gwindor was remained of the false name Túrin had given the patrolling wardens. Agarwaen, he had called himself, bloodstained son of ill-fate. Gwindor was torn between compassion and frustration. It was a mercy Túrin had not been killed outright. The Elves of Nargothrond had been growing suspicious and fearful before the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, and it seemed they’d now become calloused as well. How far they had fallen from the honor of old. 

The sound of a banging door echoed loudly against the dungeon’s stone walls. Rapid footsteps, a woman’s voice: “I demand to see him at once!” 

“Princess Finduilas, I must advise caution!” Boots hurried after the lighter pat-pat of slippers. “His claims can hold no truth! It is known Prince Gwindor was killed in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad after a reckless charge that cost—”

“I would advise you not to finish that sentence! No one in Nargothrond knows what happened. We have only rumors of rumors, and you _will not_ disparage a lord of Nargothrond with them. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, my lady, forgive me. I spoke in ignorance.”

“You certainly did. See it does not happen again.”

“Of course, my lady.” The footsteps continued. Gwindor’s face pointed at the door, staring into the corridor on the other side like a starving man. Nothing could be seen yet, but that voice was unmistakable. “I really must advise against viewing the prisoner, my lady. We do not know for what purpose he was released from the Enemy’s thralldom, it could be for the mission of killing you!”

And then she was there. Standing there staring back at him through the bars. It felt like Gwindor’s skeleton reassembled itself piece by fractured piece. Sunlight wrapped itself about his neck like a scarf. His heart would burst from—

There was pity in her eyes. She tried to hide it, quickly tuck it away and cover it with ‘Gwindor’ gasped out of her mouth. But he’d seen, he’d seen. What? Did he actually expect something better? He should be grateful she even recognized him.

“Open the door this instant!”

The guard hurried with the keys. He took too long, and she snatched them out of his hands and opened the lock herself. She threw the door wide and was across the cramped cell in three swift strides. Her arms closed around his withered body, her hair like sunlight falling across his face; her smell, her smell, her smell all over him. But if he were to stand now, she’d have the greater height, and even in her shadow he’d contaminate her beauty. His fingers trembled on the fine bones of her spine, hesitant to touch her, yet so desperate he could not stop himself. They were going to get married once, and now his hand lay upon the straight line of her back like the claw of an Orc.

He withdrew as if scalded.

“What is wrong? Gwindor?”

“My lady!” The guard rushed forward, placing himself between Finduilas and the creature crouching before her, as if between the princess and a monster. “He is a thrall of Morgoth! You cannot know—”

“You do not have any evidence—”

The guard reached forward, grabbed Gwindor’s ragged shirt by the collar and ripped it. Gwindor screamed as memories overflowed the fence, shaking it like an on-coming, unstoppable typhoon. Túrin cried out, jumping up to wrestle the guard away, but the mark had already been exposed. There, branded into Gwindor’s shoulder, was the black brand of a thrall.

Finduilas’ hand pressed into her mouth, her eyes transfixed by the gruesome sight. Gwindor wished he’d never come here. He wished he’d died in the wilds with his last sight the beauty of the stars, and the knowledge that he’d soon be coming home to the arms of his family as he closed his eyes in peace for the last time. He wished he could wash away the sounds of his own people’s harsh voices calling him ‘Morgoth’s thrall,’ and Finduilas’ eyes trembling with pity and horror. He wanted to sink into the cell floor and disappear from the world.

But then, just when he thought Finduilas would flee from him in revulsion, she spun around to slap the guard across the face. “If you ever touch him again I will cut off your hand! Now get out of my sight and send in a person with basic human empathy, and I might, _might_ , consider not having you demoted and sent to the Northern border!” 

The guard fled, and Túrin helped Gwindor pull his torn shirt back into place. Túrin’s hand was strong and soothing as it drew Gwindor to shaky feet, and Gwindor leaned into his warm shoulder, soaking up strength. When his knees could hold him and the fence was re-fortified, he followed Finduilas out of the cell with all the dignity he could muster.


	76. Chapter 62

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turin’s names:  
> Agarwaen (Blood-stained son of ill-fate): This was the name Turin introduced himself as, but I doubt he was called this long.  
> Adanedhel (Elf-Man): At this point in the story Turin goes by this. It is the name he’s given by the people of Nargothrond.  
> Mormegil (Black-sword): Turin will earn this name later, as he rises in favor in Nargothrond, and becomes the head military commander.

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 62

He was gone, and it hadn’t been enough that she missed him, it had to _hurt_. 

Finduilas had made it hurt, one hand after another, until she felt like a bruised plum that had been eaten from the inside out. Empty kisses, lovers she’d never be able to crawl out from under. They would caress her, whisper how much they loved parts of her. They praised her waves of hair, her slender waist, her beasts (always). She looked through them with eyes as indifferent as the sea. (Let me be rotting driftwood upon its heaving chest).

She’d devoured herself in her regret. She’d tried to take out her backbone and unravel who she was, dissect what went wrong in there, why ‘discovering herself’ had lost herself. But all she’d done was pop vertebra, crack, crack, crack. She hadn’t found out where she’d gone, only where she ended; what she lacked. 

Callused and dainty hands made her shiver, but couldn’t ignite a burn under her skin (they weren’t _his_ hands). They didn’t make her stronger or freer; there weren’t any stars waiting for her to kiss, just more hands touching her cold skin. They left her a frostbitten liar whose insecurities had wrapped around Gwindor’s neck and flung him down with her into the pit. 

Lúthien convinced her her love for Gwindor was a little girl’s, just the childish footsteps of a heart. So she kept him at arm’s length. She searched for something she couldn’t define, only that she wanted to kiss stars, wanted to be unbound and flying free as crane’s wings towards the sun. Everywhere she looked in those days she saw a cage: her father’s loving but rigid authority, Gwindor’s arms closing in about her, duties crushing in her chest, ripping all the feathers off her wings. 

She never had found what she’d been searching for. Years passed, and the betrothal stretched to gossip-worthy length. Gwindor spoke of marriage, hinting subtly, and then less subtly. She put him off until he stopped bringing it up, until one day he asked what she knew was coming: Do you want to be released from the betrothal? 

It was cruel to cling to it, dragging him along like baggage behind the mountain of her doubts. But beneath everything else, she loved him, even if it was a child’s love. So she had answered ‘no,’ and their farce of a betrothal continued.

Gwindor rode off to war and never came back. Nargothrond officially pronounced him, and all those who’d ridden with him, dead. They heard no accounts of the battle but through rumors, for they’d shut their doors against the refugees fleeing the destruction of the North. They’d chased them from their lands, wanting nothing to do with more suffering.

The rumors said Gwindor had lost the battle single-handedly. He’d charged too soon, but no one knew why, other than that he was a hot-head from the South, probably glory-hungry. But that wasn’t her Gwindor; that wasn’t the man she knew. She’d asked him, now he was home again, but he wouldn’t speak of it. 

Gwindor was home now, but he’d been dead for so many years…

Rosmal said, in that way she had of imitating sucking a lemon but not actually wrinkling her pouty mouth: “This must be so hard on you, Finduilas.” She said Finduilas’ name as if they were friends. They were not.

Gwaloth twirled a curl on her finger. She’d braided her vanity with lavender ribbons today. She was one of the few court ladies who didn’t wear her hair in gold-wire and jewel-encrusted headbands. This was not a mark of humility, but self-absorption with her ringlets. 

Gwaloth plucked at an embroidered rose on her gown, her meticulously kept nails pausing as she looked over at Finduilas. She had the soulful-eyes of a bride. She gazed at Finduilas with large eyes brimming with nauseating pity. “It is such a shame,” she reached out to place a hand over Finduilas.’ “Prince Gwindor used to be so handsome and brave. We all envied you so! My mother says you will keep the announcement quiet, and I think that is best. Poor Gwindor has suffered so much; there is no need to shame him.” 

Finduilas slipped her hand out from under Gwaloth’s. “What announcement?”

“Why, the dissolvement of your betrothal, of course.” This was Rosmal. Her eyes possessed none of Gwaloth tactless naivety, but the curler sword of calculated thrusts. “He was a great prince of the Noldor once, but now, well,” she shrugged a pointed shoulder. “No one will judge you. Imagine actually _marrying_ him,” she gave a dramatic shiver. “His eyes, do you think they glow in the dark like an Orc’s?”

Gwaloth gasped. “Rosmal! How can you say such a terrible thing! Poor Gwindor is hard to look upon, but how can you compare him to those monsters?”

Lady Olneth finished a cross-stitch with a sharp tug. She’d lost her husband in the Dagor Bragollach. “Princess Finduilas is fortunate to have her beloved returned to her. She should count her blessing, not gossip about them.” The lady looked at Finduilas with accusing eyes as if Finduilas had been the one slighting Gwindor. 

Finduilas wanted to snap all the court ladies’ necks. Instead she lowered her needle-work carefully into her lap. “I appreciate your concern, but there will be no announcement. I will remain betrothed to Prince Gwindor. His appearance should have no bearing on my heart, indeed it has none.” 

“Betrothed, naturally.” Lady Olneth raised a contemptuous brow as if Finduilas had failed a test. 

Finduilas swallowed down the hornets stinging her tongue, and picked up her work again. Lady Olneth’s judgment made her feel superficial and flighty in a way the younger ladies’ loose tongues could not. They were concerned with Gwindor’s destroyed beauty, not understanding how Finduilas could bear the touch of his ugly hands (was not hideousness akin to evilness?). Gwindor’s body was ruined, she was not blind. But Gwindor’s destroyed body was a mate to the destruction she’d wrecked upon herself. 

She would not terminate the betrothal quietly, but nor was she leaping into his arms, chattering about marriage and the future. She felt dead inside, hollowed out.

She excused herself with all the grace she could muster, and retreated to the cold sanctuary of her rooms. She disgusted herself with her pretence at virtue. Oh how selfless Princess Finduilas was that she would yoke herself to an Orc-eyed, hideous fiend!

She dug her nails into the silk bedcovers. A hand crept over her stomach. Hollow. Hollow. Hollow.

 _Túranno_. She threw back her head and grimaced at the canopy, exposing her gums in a snarl. There was a baby growing in there once, under the skin of her belly. It was going to be a son. His name had come to her in a dream as he bloomed in darkness, as all mother-names do. It whispered across her mouth: Túranno. But her son would never have a name because she’d drunk down poison and stilled the flutter of his heart. 

The reasons had sounded plausible in her head. Gildor had not agreed, and she knew she’d been selfish to beg her cousin’s help. But when she’d looked down at the child lying in the lake of his palm, something had torn inside her, and though she didn’t deserve it, she was eternally grateful to Gildor for not leaving her alone in the dark with the stain of her son between her legs. 

She’d been afraid. Cringing away like a beaten dog from the imagined disappointment and betrayal in her father’s eyes. How could she bear to see his love for her morph into shame? 

Mother’s death, Uncle Finrod and Uncle Aegnor, Grandfather Angrod, Gwindor and Gelmir and— Father and her clung to each other like vines. They were each other’s support in a frothing sea. Nargothrond had sent its last king out to die, and they loved Orodreth far less. Her promiscuousness would ruin her if it came to light, but that was nothing, _nothing_ , to the guilt of lying yet another weight upon her father’s head.

It wasn’t only that she’d lain with a man outside the bonds of marriage or even betrothal; it was that Túranno’s father was a _Fëanorion_. His name was Rommaen, and he hadn’t been like the others. He’d made her laugh. They used to meet away from prying eyes, and wander the woods of Taur-en-Faroth. He’d pick daisies and tickle her nose. She peeled the skin off her heart, and he started listening to its beat before she showed him her skin. He reminded her of Gwindor. 

She’d found comfort in his kiss, his laughter, his clever witticisms, and had sought him out again and again. Too much. She’d grown careless. Rumors began winding around her as they ever did around those in high status, small eyes looking for missteps. Her father remarked upon the acquaintance: “One of the Fëanorion silver-smiths, Finduilas? It is not wise to encourage his attentions. Celebrimbor may have renounced his family, but Fëanorions, they are not like us. They play by their own rules. I do not want them to hurt you. And they will, Finduilas. They always do.”

Then it hadn’t mattered if Rommaen had kind eyes and told the funniest tales about his brother that sent her sides into stitches, because she carried his child and it was only a matter of time before the dots were connected. Her son was the bastard child of a Fëanorion silver-smith. There would be no forgiveness for such a betrayal in Nargothrond. 

Gildor listened to all her reasoning’s, some justified, some trapped, some selfish. His fingers grew whiter and whiter in his lap as she begged his help. He wanted her to tell Rommaen: _Couldn’t the father raise the child? Couldn’t you find shelter with his people if Nargothrond turns on you?_ She answered: _I cannot do that to my father._

Gildor had looked at her a long moment in which she could not meet his eyes, before he told her he could not aid her in this. He in turn pleaded with her to seek another path, to not judge her father’s response prematurely. But she had known better. Naïve Gildor, always thinking the best of everyone, just like Uncle had, didn’t understand. 

In the end she had to expose herself to acquire the proper herbs. She ground the potion in solitude, and drank it down alone in her bedchamber without even a friend’s hand to hold her through this.

It seemed to take an eternity for the herbs to begin their work, and when they did she wished to die from the agony. She was writhing on the bed when Gildor found her. He took her in his arms and the cool blue of the ocean washed over her. She laid against the solidity of his chest, smelt crisp salt air as he rocked her, and heard the crashing of the surf as his breastbone vibrated as he sang. The pain eased. 

When the contractions finally subsided, her hair was slicked against her forehand and her limbs shook uncontrollably. Gildor wrapped Túranno in a cloth, and cleaned up the white coat of the afterbirth as Finduilas shuddered from aftershocks on the bed. Gildor buried Túranno in the cold womb of the Earth. 

Afterward, when they’d lain in the dark, the corpse of her child a ghost between them, her voice broke as she requested: “Show me where you buried him?”

Gilder’s voice was rough. She was grateful she couldn’t see his face. “In the morning. I will take you if you are well enough.”

She did not try to find his hand. She did not ask him if he forgave her for begging this of him. She did not forgive herself.

*

There was something blacker than sadness in Gwindor’s eyes. Gildor wanted to eat all the blackness out of Gwindor’s mind. But he didn’t know how to begin licking up even a drop of that endless well. None of them did. There were hands reaching out, trying to help Gwindor to his feet, but none of the hands knew where to start, or what the progression from palms to knees to soles looked like. 

There had been other escaped thralls, the ones from Tol-in-Gaurhoth’s fall. But though they had been spared the death sentence of the law, they received no eager welcome home. But all had long faded or run away to the wilderness. 

Nargothrond was failing Gwindor as it had failed the others. Gildor didn’t blame Orodreth. Orodreth had no skill to sway hearts so deeply fled into shadows and fear; he was no orator, no statesman. Self-preservation had become the rule of life in Nargothrond. Orodreth punished the border patrols who hunted indiscriminately (Orcs, Dwarves, Edain, Elves, it made no difference), but the wardens would cover for their comrades, so most transgressions slipped passed without facing the whip of justice.

“You are looking well today, Gwindor.” Finduilas’ voice was falsely cheerful. It was painful how desperately she attempted to bolster an optimism in Gwindor neither of them possessed.

It was one of Gwindor’s better days. He’d gotten out of bed, groomed himself to the best of his ability, and stuck to his schedule, even attending the morning’s council meeting. This was a good day.

It was late afternoon now, and Finduilas had come bearing cakes and tea. She used to come in the mornings, but their relationship had tipped into the mold of patient and caregiver, Finduilas having to encourage Gwindor on the worst days to eat and attempt the day’s schedule so he had no time to brood. Gwindor had endured it admirably for a week before he’d snapped, humiliated and grieved that their relationship was reduced to this. The Adan, Adanedhel, was often away at the borders, throwing himself into the war effort, so Gildor volunteered for the task of Gwindor’s unofficial caretaker.

Gwindor’s smile was more a grimace, but he tried, for Finduilas; he was always trying. It was not for lack of effort he was struggling. Finduilas smiled back, a pale slice of moon. She settled the tea tray on the low table before Gwindor and Gildor. “It smells lovely in here! Rosemary?”

Gildor carefully did not look at Gwindor. “Yes.” He did not elaborate. He’d brought the herbs to disguise the acidic scent of a bedwetting. Finduilas may have held his role that first week, but Gwindor had hidden as much as he could from her. Not a night passed without nightmares, and the servants were kept busy cleaning the soiled sheets. 

Finduilas poured them each a cup of steaming tea. “How was the council meeting this morning?” She made surface chatter, skimming over depths as vast and restless as the sea.

Gwindor took the mug from her with fingers that would never fully straighten. But he could still hold a sword. They’d gone down to the practice fields when the stars paled with the rising sun’s promise, going early to spare Gwindor any humiliation. Gwindor’s arms had been strings, only strong enough to swing the sword a few minutes before they gave out, but he’d held his posture, and his hand had not failed him. They went to the practice fields on Gwindor’s good days. Gwindor was obsessed with the idea of not to being ‘useless.’

“The council was productive.” _Was it really,_ Gildor wanted to ask, _or was it torture?_ But Gwindor would never admit such to Finduilas. A pretty veil of lies shrouded them. Finduilas pretending to be the girl she once was, her life idyllic now her betrothed was returned to her; Gwindor played at normalcy, praying that if no one spoke of the last eighteen years they could be erased; and Gildor was their secret keeper, swallowing all the pain he could pluck out (so insignificant an amount).

Gwindor took a sip of tea. It was mechanical, as everything was these days. Gildor had thought, in the beginning, that he could fix Gwindor. He’d thrown himself into the role of caregiver, believing it was only a matter of time before Gwindor began showing signs of healing. What a childish hope. He was far passed worried that Gwindor took no enjoyment in anything anymore. He was downright alarmed.

Every day was like walking a rope bridge, unpredictable. In the morning their eyes would meet –sometimes Gwindor would already be dressed, sometimes still twisted in the bed sheets— and in that one look Gildor would learn what kind of day it was going to be. 

On the bad days it was a struggle to get Gwindor out of bed and choke down a few bites at meals, and he never left the rooms unless a violent memory drove him out. Increasingly it was a listlessness so profound it infected his soul at the root of these days. But in the beginning, when the fragile flower of Gwindor’s optimism wilted, it was anger. So much bitterness, so much fury, and the scariest part was not the curses thrown at Nargothrond’s people, old friends who gave him nothing but pity, or worse, scorn, it was the rage against his own weakness. 

But what Gildor feared the most was not the bad days, it was that one day Gwindor would vanish. Gildor would come into the room with the sun and find the bed empty, a glass of water on the bedside table and the sheets cold. And Gildor would know, in that instant, that Gwindor was never coming back, that he’d run away like all those other thralls, lost to the wilderness and madness.

Their strained tea was interrupted by a clattering in the corridor and the echo of voices. Gildor recognized Adanedhel’s voice, deep and alluring as the ocean’s, and the higher pitch of female servants. They only had to wait a few moments before Adanedhel swept into the room in that dominating, yet hushed way of his. The Adan certainly had a presence.

Gwindor stood to greet his friend. They embraced despite the dried filth on Adanedhel’s armor and the stretch he carried into the room. “I had not heard news of your returning.”

Adanedhel held Gwindor cautiously in his arms, as a Mortal might embrace their aged father. He nodded solemnly as they parted (Gildor had yet to see him smile, not even in greeting). “Our company returned early with news of a triumph for the king. I have just come from reporting now. We have driven the Orcs back north of the Andram, all the way to the Falls of Sirion. The Enemy’s lines have been thoroughly routed, and we hold The Long Wall with strength.”

“The Andram cleared?” Finduilas’ head snapped up. “It has been nearly twenty years since the Orcs overrun those defenses!”

“That is what I am given to understand, Lady Finduilas.” Turin inclined his head. “Yet we held the field regardless.”

Finduilas rose, mouth parted; Gildor’s eyes were equally wide. When had Nargothrond last known such a victory? Not since the North fell after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. 

“Nargothrond will know rejoicing again! I will prepare a Victory Feast in your name, Adanedhel,” Finduilas promised as was Adanedhel’s due. “The Great Hall has not known a Victory Feast in more years than is dwelt upon.”

“I would give Nargothrond many more if your people but cast aside this shadow-method of warfare. It was but chance that we engaged the Enemy’s forces upon the Guarded Plain, and many times the captains wished to retreat back into the shadows, though we were winning the day!”

The corners of Finduilas’ mouth pulled down. “Yes, stealth has long been Nargothrond’s policy of warfare. I do not assume to be knowledgeable on the ways of war, but victories are hard to argue with.”

Gwindor’s countenance soured. “Victory? It will soon turn into mourning feasts if Orodreth yields to this counsel.” Adanedhel’s mouth grimed. 

Unfortunate words were closing-in, dancing tighter and tighter circles about them. Gildor interjected: “Would you join us, Adanedhel? Finduilas brought some cake, didn’t you Finduilas?” But though Adanedhel accepted the invitation, excusing himself to Gwindor’s inner bedchamber to shuck his sullied armor, the conversation’s course was not re-written.

Finduilas cut the seedcake with tight lips, wrist flicking in sharp, precise strokes. “Adanedhel has reclaimed the Andram and pushed the Shadow back. That is something worth celebrating, is it not?” 

Gwindor took the offered seedcake with a word of thanks. “These victories are only temporary. Every Orc driven out of Nargothrond’s provinces is one more running back to Morgoth with tales of our strength. It draws his eye.”

“And I suppose you would have us sulk in the shadows like cowards?” Finduilas’ face immediately creased in regret, “forgive me. I should not have spoken so harshly.”

Gwindor’s fingers curled into a ball, knuckles bleaching. “It is nothing.” More lies. 

An awkward silence descended between them, the scrape of forks upon glass and modest sips of tea the only sounds. Gildor restrained his fingers from reaching over to cut the cake into more accessible bites for Gwindor. Gwindor would not appreciated the display of inadequacy before Finduilas. 

Gwindor’s hand spasmed, fork dropping to the floor. Gildor picked it up, wiped it on a napkin, and returned it to him. They went on eating, pretending nothing had happened. 

The silence grew too weighty, Gildor’s limbs too shaky, and his restless bones released themselves through his tongue. He talked. About nothing, about anything. “Do you know Ferlith? She is one of the kitchen girls, button-nose, tall as—”

“I do not spend my time in the kitchens but when business calls me,” Finduilas sighed.

“Well maybe you should. You cannot find merrier laughter than in the kitchens and laundries. Anyway,” he rose, wandering away to shake out his limbs (Finduilas didn’t want to laugh). “She was apple-picking last harvest, got hired on as an extra hand –It is an easy way for the common laborers to collect a few trade-beads, the harvest season’s wages are always the best. She was working in one of Lord Rochiel’s fields – Adanedhel, do you like cards?” His searching fingers plucked up a deck.

The sound of the brass washing basin hitting the floor came from behind Gwindor’s closed bedroom door. A grunted curse, then a muffled voice calling: “It is an acceptable means of passing the time, but I wish no offence to Lady Finduilas by putting her out.”

“Oh Finduilas will be playing with us, and you had best bring your coin purse, for if I do not clean you out, she will!”

“Where was I?” He shuffled the deck, fingers dextrose as a harpist’s upon strings. “So Ferlith was out in the fields apple-picking—” He chatted away about the kitchen maid’s adventures, including the bit about the cow, the ‘raspberry’ stained skirts, and the deliciously scandalous pasture all the avidly listening servants had promised to avoid in future while secretly planning to investigate the next time they were nearby.

Adanedhel returned in a clean tunic of Gwindor’s during the telling, and if Gildor squinted, he thought he could make out an upwards tilt to the Man’s mouth. Finduilas had one of her half-smiles on too. Gwindor’s lips were humorously bland, but since he was no longer brooding on coming disasters, Gildor considered the story a success.

He dealt them all in. Adanedhel and Finduilas started arguing about the differences between Nargothrond and Doriath’s rules, but it was a light-hearted banter. Gwindor arranged his cards without enthusiasm, but in card-playing Gwindor had found a use for his perpetual apathy (Gildor was looking for an upside). Gwindor had the most amazing straight-face for he didn’t give a fig if he won or lost. 

It was into this atmosphere (the most relaxed Gildor could conjure for three such persons) that Gwindor suggested in a tone edging towards interest: “You should take your sword down to the Fëanorion smiths, Adanedhel. I noticed the blade was dull. It is a wonder it has served you so well in battle thus far.”

Adanedhel’s fingers stilled in their arrangement of his tricks. “It has always been thus.”

Gwindor lowered his cards –awkward, everything was awkward with only one hand—something passed between their eyes. A secret. “Still, I do not like the thought of an ill-kept blade the only thing between you and death, my friend. The Fëanorions are master smiths; in their hands the blade will be re-made with the sole purpose of cutting Orc-necks.”

“You should take it to Celebrimbor.” Finduilas’ gaze flickered between the two men. “He is the best smith in Nargothrond, perhaps all of Beleriand. A blade forged by him will never break.”

Adanedhel stared down at his hands for a long moment, before slowly conceding with ‘very well.’ Gildor picked at the stitching in his tunic’s hem. This was a good thing. Adanedhel would have a superior blade, and Gwindor had expression something beyond apathy. It wasn’t like anyone was asking him to go to the smithies with them, or to speak with _his_ son. Yes, a good thing, all around.

His fingers wrapped around the belly of his mug, soaking up the lingering heat of the tea. It wasn’t like he had to speak with the man whose face reminded him sharply of one once occupying so many of his thoughts. It had been a child’s infatuation, he knew that now, but it had reigned supreme in his fantasies and childish-heart for many years. The infatuation was utterly extinguished, but it had been the pain of a snapping bone when it shattered. Not an easy blow for a ‘first love’s’ dissolution.

He took a sip of the tea, closing his eyes while the liquid slipped down his throat, warming his belly. When he opened them again he fixed a smile to his lips, picked up his cards, and began chiding Adanedhel good-naturedly for holding up the game with his brooding. He had more important things to concern himself with than old breaks. Next to the sawed-off limbs where his father and Gelmir once hung, and Gwindor’s shattered skeleton, the broken bone Curufin had left behind was nothing. 

*

He missed his father. He missed his family. When the distraction of a project was stripped away and Celebrimbor returned to his empty chambers at night, poured himself a glass of wine, and stared at the fire, the loneliness swallowed him whole. Sometimes it felt like he was a dead body floating in a river, just skimming the surface, unable to bear the rush of a plunge back into living.

His thoughts preyed on him, and he dreamt horrible deaths finding his father, his uncles. The mere thought of anything happening to them was enough to leave him gasping on the floor, hand burning into the place on his breast strangling him with fearlovedreadagony. So he didn’t think, he stuffed the thoughts down and threw himself into project after project to take his mind off reality for as many hours in a day as he could run away. He’d promised himself he was never going to lose himself in his work like this again, but it _hurt_. His heart was a stone dropped into a black lake.

He wished he could stitch up his mouth, cut out his tongue, and unmake that day. He wished he could unsay the words of severance. He wished he could have his father and family back, the way they were, in Valinor.

But wishes couldn’t undo anything. So he worked on taking his heart and stuffing it back into his chest. He worked on sewing himself back together again. He stared at the crooked lines of black thread in his wounds, showing him where he’d been split, and told himself they made him stronger (but his heart was still stuttering and stammering in his chest).

At the forge, the loneliness was a subdued ache in the back of his teeth. It wasn’t only the escape of a project, it was the company of his fellow smiths. He worked best alone, but if it was his own people he was surrounded with he didn’t mind the company. The Fëanorion smiths who had stayed with him in Nargothrond knew better than to force their lord into gregariousness. They didn’t pester him to join their banter, and so their conversations skimmed the surface of his consciousness as his mind delved deep into itself. The steady clang, clang, clang of hammers striking anvils, the hiss of quenching, the puff of the bellows, and the chatter of the smiths was the background accompaniment to the symphony unfolding in his head. 

“You keep talking Morrond, no one is buying,” Rommaen laughed, swinging his hammer. 

“You are one to talk,” Morrond tossed a freshly beaten sheet of steel away. “I heard about that bit of trouble you had with the seamstress at the RoseHead.” He wiggled his eyebrows, “Too much woman for you, Rommaen? Couldn’t quite _keep up_.”

Rommaen’s teeth glinted in the firelight, hair swinging to the rhythm of his hammer strokes. His russet hair was like the sleek coat of a war-horse. He’d pulled it up in a high club, a style he favored for forgoing. “Ah, you would call my prowess into question? This from the man whose own has failed him when he gets a mere pitcher into his cups!” 

“Oi!” Morrond mock-threw his tongs at Rommaen, and laughter rang off the walls. “I will have you know that was a onetime occurrence, and it was a barrel, not a pitcher! And how do you know that anyway? Do you make a habit of following men into alleyways, Rommaen?”

“A man has to do his business after eight cups of wine, you idiot. I am no voyeur!”

“So you say!”

“But if I happened to get an eyeful, I might have assumed the lady would have been less than satisfied even if you got in it!” Rommaen winked.

“That is it, Rommaen, you scoundrel! You wait until I catch _you_ in your cups, everyone knows you will take any bet when drunk. You just watch yourself!” Morrond wagged a finger at Rommaen, but his cheeks were blooming in a smile, so no one took the threat seriously. 

The teasing was interrupted when the forge door swung open and an Adan marched in, a grey shadow trailing behind him. The atmosphere immediately sobered. The Fëanorions could be free with each other, but Outsiders were presented a room of solemn-faced Elves so dedicated to the perfection of their craft they forwent the gratifications of the flesh.

Celebrimbor had no interest in political machinates. Even if he’d wanted to dip his toes into politics he would have been shunned for his name alone. But even he was not so oblivious he failed to recognize their two controversial guests. 

The Adan was the Mortal who’d named himself Agarwaen, before the Elves of Nargothrond re-christened him Adanedhel for his beauty. The Elf following in his shadow could easily be mistaken for an elderly Edain. Celebrimbor remembered a time when Gwindor’s broad shoulders would have been the first through any door, a sunlit breeze still echoing with his last burst of laughter trailing in his wake.

Celebrimbor had heard the rumors, most of them the ugly children born of fearful-hearts. The rumors were only that, rumors; for such ugly words are rarely spoken in the crispness of light where their foulness could be unveiled. In corners lips whispered of Gwindor’s thralldom, and hurtful speculations were spun of Gwindor being a spy of Morgoth’s, enthralled to the Dark One’s will. From careless tongue to careless tongue the words were spread. It was easy to forget the Elf they took such delight in debasing had once been one of their most honored princes who had suffered hell for the protection of Middle-earth. 

The gossip was fed as news of closed-door councils trickled into eager ears, and it became known that Gwindor spoke against open-warfare in council meetings, even as the Adan he led into their halls handed them victories, spoke with passion, and walked with power.

“I seek Celebrimbor Fëanorion, is he among you?” the Adan’s voice was solid and proud as a mountain.

Celebrimbor’s delicate, ash-handled hammer tapped out the last curling petals on the flower he was scribing into the silver. When he was satisfied with the skill of the scribing, he looked up. “I am he.”

The Adan looked him over. There was pride in that chin, and well-worn sorrow in the lines of his eyes. His mouth was the kind that wore smiles seldom, but when it did they promised to turn heads and infect the hearts around him. 

The Adan pulled out a sword from its sheath at his hip. The blade was black, and Celebrimbor recognized it immediately, having held its twin in his hands long ago in Gondolin. “I would commission you, lord, for the re-forging of this blade. If you have the skill.” 

Celebrimbor ignored the jab in the words. His heart was folding over itself. He wanted to rub his thumbs into the hilt (the mirror reflection of Maeglin’s sword), and he wanted to thrust the Adan out the door and forbid him and his sword from ever crossing its threshold again. 

The urge to hold a piece of Maeglin’s heritage won out, and he left his workbench to close on the Adan. He took the sword from Adanedhel’s hands, careful to keep his hold on the neural hilt before he was ready to plunge deeper. When he had a secure grip on the hilt, he ran his fingers down the black spine, ignoring the Mortal’s sharp warning. 

His feet threatened to fall into the void opening in his mind, but his will was the stronger. He felt the yank in his navel, glimpsed wet jaws unhinging to swallow him whole. Hunger, hunger, hunger, pounded like a pulse in his head. But he was Celebrimbor Fëanorion. He had wrestled the light of a Silmaril through his blood, no alien metal was going to better him.

He drew his fingers away, the victor. Adanedhel had taken a step closer during the mental exchange, hand out-stretched to jerk him back from the plunge. 

“Do you know this blade’s maker?” Celebrimbor turned the sword in his hands.

Adanedhel’s mouth tipped, eyes riveted on Celebrimbor’s face as if searching for lingering effects. Obviously he’d doubted Celebrimbor’s ability to defeat the metal’s snare. Celebrimbor was not offended, rather, he was impressed an Adan had the strength of will to do the same. “No.” Adanedhel did not elaborate. “Will you undertake the re-forging?” No slights against Celebrimbor’s competency now.

Celebrimbor’s ears were more attuned now to the Doriathin accent in the Adan’s speech. This blade had been tribute to Elu Thingol in exchange for Eöl’s lordship of Nan Elmoth. It begged the question of what it was doing in this Adan’s possession. It was one of the rare times in Celebrimbor’s life he wished he paid more attention to politics and gossip.

He flipped the blade deftly, measuring the weight. The edge did cut a blunt edge. Peculiar, Maeglin’s sword had always maintained an impressive set of teeth. But Celebrimbor had never encountered a more temperamental metal than the Galvorn. There was no accounting for alien intelligence. 

“Well?” The Adan grew impatient, crossing his arms over his chest. Gwindor shifted behind him, laying a hand on the center of the Adan’s back. Immediately the tightness in the Adan’s face eased.

“It will have to wait for the completion of my current projects. You shall have it back in eleven days.”

“Eleven days?” Adanedhel’s mouth thinned. “I am ridding out with a company in five. I need it finished by then.”

Celebrimbor raised a brow. “I am confident you can find another blade for temporary use.”

Adanedhel opened his mouth, no doubt to argue back; there was a restless impatience in his body, as if every moment standing in idleness was one squandered that would have been better spent hacking Orc-necks. Gwindor stepped out of Adanedhel’s shadow, and said, “It is appreciated, Lord Celebrimbor. As you say, a replacement blade can be obtained with ease.” Gwindor’s hand wrapped around Adanedhel’s forearm, steering him towards the door. The Adan could have easily broken the hold, but he submitted to the guidance with only one last glower at Celebrimbor, as if Celebrimbor had personally offended him.

Rommaen snorted after the door shut behind them, and then broke down in laughter. He had a running laugh, like a herd of wild horses set loose. Not deep, but utterly unselfconscious. It was only a moment before the forge rang with laughter again. Even Celebrimbor smiled. 

Celebrimbor picked up his work again. The Adan had been half-impressive, and half-grating. But Gwindor had looked like he wanted to be anywhere but here. Celebrimbor didn’t know which was sadder, that Gwindor’s spirit should be a ghost of itself, or that Gwindor could have walked through the halls of Nargothrond and been unrecognizable to those he’d once fought alongside, drank with, laughed with, been admired by, if Finduilas had not given the ex-thrall a name.


	77. Chapter 63

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *modified Silmarillion quote

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 63

It started in innocence. 

She was not blind to Gwindor’s suffering, and though his tendency towards fatalism set her teeth on edge (it was nothing like the Gwindor she remembered), she’d sought out the Adan with the purpose of helping Gwindor. She had some vague idea of learning more of the trials the two had been through. They had formed a profound bond, with Adanedhel Gwindor’s most ardent defender. His anger roused like a pouncing lion the moment anyone slandered Gwindor. He was unshakably confident that Gwindor had never been a thrall to Morgoth’s will, and seethed at the dishonorable way Gwindor had been received by his own people. 

What had started as mutual concern for Gwindor had morphed into this: Adanedhel’s hands on her hips, his hard, youthful body pressing hers into the sheets, his mouth open and panting above her as she arched in pleasure.

She’d tasted the sadness on his breath, heard the melancholy hiding between his words like the breath of winter, and been drawn to his sorrow. His soul mourned a fatal wound. He could close his eyes as he pressed himself into her and escape the grief for a time. After years of cold skin and barren touches, it was fresh breath in her lungs to open herself and discover the comfort of sharing another’s misery.

She shed her skin and took a walk along the pathways of stars. She forgot for a while that she had a snake for a tongue, and her uprooted spine had shown her nothing but deeper layers of imperfections. She threw back her head and begged him to give her a reason to scream.

Sweat rolled down his jaw, pooled in the corner of her mouth, and pulled ecstasy from her lips. His hips slammed into hers with far less finesse than many of her past lovers, but all their skill had never unloosed the jungles rampaging under her skin like his wild abandon did. He needed her, needed this, and no one had ever needed her in this way before.

He fell against her breasts; his ribs cocooned hers, and his breath was hot like fire against her neck as he went boneless. She kept her thighs clamped about him, wanting this moment to pull into hours and days and years. She wanted to turn her head, brush her eyelashes against his cheek, and have him stiffen inside her again from their lustful flutter. She didn’t want the air to harden in her lungs, her tongue to return to slime, and her regrets to press into the back of her irises. Let it go on and on and on and on. Let her never wake.

*

—He searched for something. He walked through corridors paved with agnate stone (marble statues, jewel-studded doors, columns soaring up to a barrel-vault ceiling). He broke into a run. He was in a garden, sunlight blinding him, a child’s piping voice, an answering one the dark-red of fire, hypnotic; the kind of voice you could listen to while the world broke around you. Eyes startling as the morning star turned, another set _blazed_. Twin circlets sat upon their brows. He’d found what he’d been searching for – Túranno— tottering towards…

“Fëanor, you should not scare the child so.”

“I was doing nothing.”

“You were looking at him.”

“What is wrong with my looking?”

“It is intimidating. Turgon always said so.”

“My sons never found me intimidating.”

“Well they are your sons. There is no accounting for their tastes.”

“One could say the same of your own.”

“My children have excellent taste.” A pause, a tilted look, the laughter of star-bright eyes, a hand brushing secrets down the curve of a spine. “Give Gwindor his son back. We do not need yet another member of my family enthralled to you and yours.” 

A small body was picked up, big eyes staring with fascination at the tall man holding him, and deposited into Gwindor’s arms. A face still carrying the plumpness of its baby-years split in a grin, elbows wrapping tight around Gwindor’s neck, ‘Papa!’ Gwindor threw his son into the air, arms and kicking legs spread like bird wings. His heart pumped love, love, love—

Gwindor woke with a gasp, arms reaching out to catch a child that did not exist. He collapsed back on the bed, and crossed his stump over his eyes. The dream smirked at him from the darkness behind his eyelids, taunting him with a life of impossibilities.

He lay another moment in the sweat-soaked sheets. He didn’t smell urine. It was one of those rare nights he’d not disgraced himself. His bones felt too watery to hold his weight, so he lingered in a bed growing cold from the moisture of perspiration. Sometimes, as he lay down in darkness for yet another night re-living tortures, he’d entertain the faint hope that he’d never wake again. It was not that he had a death wish, but every time his eyes opened on another day, he couldn’t deny his disappointment.

Disguised, he threw back the sheets and forced himself to drag this weary body and soul through yet another day. He walked to the washstand, picked up the waiting pitcher, and filled the brass bowl. He dipped his hand into the chilly water and splashed his face, fingers rubbing into all the creases in once smooth cheeks and brow. 

He was hideous as an Orc.

He snapped the towel from its hook, pushing the self-pitying thoughts over a cliff and into the abyss below. If only it was this easy to murder them every day. He already knew this would be one of the good ones. 

Gildor was not here to witness it. He’d ridden out with Túrin in the latest military campaign. Orodreth was correct in thinking it would lend Túrin’s strategy credibility if one of the royal family was seen openly supporting it, and bastard through Gildor was, he was also the son of their betrayed, yet beloved Finrod. Orodreth itched to ride against the armies of Morgoth himself, but as king could not abandon his duties in the city for a long campaign in the field. The victories rolled in, but it wouldn’t be long now before they turned into defeats.

Gwindor struggled into leggings, undershirt, and a tunic with simple clasps he could fasten. His boots he left off; he would have to call a servant for assistance. It had grated what was left of his pride when he’d first returned, but he’d long since stopped caring. 

He found a meal laid out for him when he exited the inner-chamber of his rooms. There were fat sausage links. He repressed the impulse to upturn the plate. He could either lower himself to eating them like a pig, the sausage’s grease dripping down his chin as his teeth sawed into their skin, or he could leave them. There was no reason to get frustrated over the servant’s forgetfulness. 

The fact he’d eaten like an animal in Angband wasn’t the point. He was supposed to be Prince Gwindor again, not be constantly reminded of how far he’d fallen from that impossible standard. He sat down, lifted the pitcher of milk, and then cursed when his hand trembled as he poured and his cup overturned. He closed his eyes as the cold liquid spilled into his lap, soiling the leggings he’d just wrestled on.

He begged for patience, but struggled against the overwhelming desire to weep. He forced himself to stand and return to the bedchamber to shuck his ruined leggings. He sat for a time on the bed, legs naked and scared, and stared at the place the floor met the wall. 

The candle gutted out. He was plunged into sudden darkness. He tensed at the shock of the unexpected unlight. Claws raked down his back, rancid breath in his ear, grinning fangs glinted, the sound of chains dragging against stones—

No! He stumbled to the side table, fingers scrambling for the match sticks. A match struck in darkness, light shaking in his hand. He was struck speechless by its beauty. Slowly, reverently, he lowered the flame to the still smoking candlewick. Fire threw the shadows back, laughing at the thought of ever being conquered. 

Estel was a shimmer upon his skin, defiance an ember dancing in his irises. He clenched a sun in his fist. His hope was stronger than whip, fang, or unspeakable defilements in the dark. 

He touched the naked flame. This was why he pulled himself through days when all he could smell was the Darkness closing its jaws around him. He would keep rising from that bed again and again and as many times as it took. His Estel had not reached into this life, but the next one waited for him. When he joined his brother and parents, he would do so without the shame of having succumbed to despair.

*

Finduilas raised her hand to knock, dropped it, raising it, dropped it. She firmed her jaw and set knuckles to wood. There was no answer. She knocked harder.

“A moment!” His voice used to have a lilt to it, as if it was perpetually flirting with a laugh. Just listening to his voice could make her smile. He’d been life. Living large and tearing through any mountain in his path to seizing the day. A force of nature, fuelled by optimism of a breathtaking degree. Had anyone loved life as Gwindor had? Maybe Finrod; Uncle had had that same vitality.

She waited with a band closing tight on her chest for long moments until the door opened and Gwindor admitted her to his chambers. “Forgive the mess,” he waved at a ruined breakfast.

“Could I send for another?” She seized the distraction, anything to delay the reason for her coming. She was a coward.

“It is nothing, forget it.” He waved her to the couch, bypassing the table where milk dripped onto the floor with a languid plop plop. He sat with her, scrunched into the opposite side of the couch, well out of arm’s distance and certainly touching. 

He was very careful never to touch her now, as if she might leap up screaming if his skin brushed against hers. Why must he always assume weakness? She was not a delicate flower.

“You are early.”

Was that censure in his voice or mortification? She would have come every day, been his hands (not his smile, she couldn’t be those any longer) if only he’d let her. She was no longer that girl he’d courted, ignorant of womanhood, bewildered by her breasts and hips and pleasures. Nor was she the woman he’d been betrothed to who thought she’d surrendered her heart like a child to the first man who’d pushed apple-blossoms into her hair. She was a woman who love, love, loved him (who he’d once been). She was a woman who didn’t know how to love –not him, not herself.

“What brings you?” His arms crossed over his stomach as if he could fold into the cushions and disappear. Her Gwindor would have been stretched out, fingers walking over to play with hers, his mouth bumping close to whisper things in her ear and tease the sensitive skin behind it. She wanted to walk into the past, find her Gwindor and pass him her heart, palm to lips, and watch him swallow it down like rich wine. She never wanted it back.

She opened her mouth, but the words stuck in her throat. _I am pregnant with the child of your dearest friend. I have made a fool out of you, of your enduring love. But forgive me because I have already killed one of my children; I cannot kill a second. So I will carry this one in my womb. Nargothrond will watch my stomach bloom, and everyone will know how I have shamed you and myself._

The words wouldn’t come. She was a frostbitten liar with a rabbit for a heart. “Gwindor…” Her voice faded to nothing. She pulled her knee up and levered herself close enough to take his hand. He tried to jerk away but her hand was the stronger.

“Finduilas, let go! You should not—”

“What? Should not touch you?” She clutched his hand tighter. “I am tired, Gwindor. Tired of you pretending everything is all right, because it isn’t, and I have no idea what I am supposed to do!” Her voice cracked like glass. “Stop treating me like something to be contaminated. I am not the girl you left behind. I will never be her again, and you must be blind not to see that.”

He twisted his hand in hers, but she would not release him. He wasn’t going to shove her out. “I know that. I know. But I cannot…can’t you see what I have becom—”

“Enough already! Why must you continually point out all the places you think yourself lacking? Gwindor would not have—” She tripped over herself.

His lips twisted. “Easier, isn’t it, to think of him as a different person than this?” He yanked his hand away from her slackened grip.

What did it matter when she told him or how? There was no words soft enough to walk over these coals, and she’d become a cactus, far too prickly to do things prettily anymore. He had a right to hear of her sins against him from her lips. He was her betrothed and she’d betrayed that bond (over and over, but that was before, when she’d believed him dead).

“I am not the same girl you remember.” She couldn’t get any further. 

His fingers burrowed into his palm, as if seeking protection. She crossed the distance between their skin, took his fist in her hand, and worked his fingers out of hiding. He let her, watching her face. She did not look up to meet his eyes.

“I know,” he released his fingers like an exhaled breath. “If you were the girl I remembered, you would not be sitting here beside me now; I would not let you.”

She needed to tell him, tell him before he said something beautiful and utterly undeserving of her. “I am not good anymore. I am just dust motes and debris.” 

“Yes, your light is diminished, and by the measure of many of our people your purity has been soiled.” Her jaw clenched. She didn’t want to hear this, didn’t need a rehashing of all her mistakes. “That you are no longer that girl of innocence I first fell in love with is a relief.” Her eyes flew to his face. His hand trembled between her two caging ones, but he was holding hers back. “Do you know what I see when I look at you?” He raised his stump as if to brush back the hair falling into her eyes with fingers he no long possessed. He’d forgotten, and the vision of his deformity brought a grimace to his mouth as he quickly hid the abrupt ending of his arm in its sleeve again.

“What?” She didn’t deserve even a scrap of kindness from his lips, but she was desperate to disrupt the path of his thoughts yet had none of Gildor’s natural affinity to defuse thorny situations with the power of a smile.

Gwindor’s gaze focused on her again. “I see a wiser woman, a harder one too. Do you think the girl you were before could have touched me like this?” He looked down at the way her hands curled around his knotted bones. “She would have been repulsed, and been right to be so.”

“Don’t.”

He didn’t stop. “She would not have been able to bear looking at me. My hands would have disgusted her.” His voice dripped with the acid of self-deprecation cording his veins. “And as for this mouth, she would not have—”

Finduilas sealed the self-hating lips with her own. Gwindor’s mouth was dry and cracked under hers, and it pulled away like one burned. He freed his hand, legs seeking out a hold on the floor to rise and carry him away from her in his shock. “Don’t touch me!”

She didn’t know what she was doing, only that she wanted to scrape all the self-flagellation out of his ribs. “Didn’t you just say I was not that girl anymore? I know what I want.”

“Don’t mock me. Not _you_. You cannot fool me into thinking you could possibly want _this_.”

She seized him firmly by the jaw and kissed him. Gwindor trembled under her lips. She kissed her sorrys into his mouth. 

(I’m sorry I am a liar and a betrayer. I’m sorry I pulled a better future with someone else out from beneath your feet. I’m sorry I am doing this to you now because I still remember, with the pure keen blush of peonies, my virginal fumbles under your fingertips. I’m sorry I loved you but couldn’t figure out what I wanted when I had the chance. I’m sorry I love who you were.)

She kissed the gaps in his smile, his rough lips, until he stopped tugging at her hands and pushing her shoulders away. She hooked his weak breath in her cupped hands, drank the memory of sunlight from his tongue, and licked the ghost of her Gwindor from his lips. She tried to shove him down her throat, feel the satisfaction of a gulp, and stuff the memory of their love into the gaping emptiness inside her. 

She could not satisfy her starving hollows, or fill in all her caverns with what wasn’t there in his mouth. He was only a shadow of her Gwindor. And she was a seashell left behind on an ocean floor, empty. She ran her fingers over his castle ribs, the gorges in his back, and the roots in his shoulders, searching for what was lost. But she had never traveled a more exhausted road than the paths of his skin.

But then, when she thought to pull away, saddened by the arc of bones so similar and yet dissimilar to the ones she longed for, Gwindor’s mouth pressed up into hers, his hand tangling in her hair, yanking it in his frenzy. His stump touched her as if he’d ceased to notice or care; it wrapped around her waist, tight, desperate, terrified of her escape. He scratched her back, right through the material of her dress, and then shoved the fabric up her hips, sinking his hand into the flesh of her thighs as she straddled him. It wasn’t what she’d expected of him, but not unpleasant either to be touched as if he wanted to consume her. It was nothing like the way he’d once held her as if she were a doe, a bird, in his arms.

“Finduilas, Finduilas, Finduilas.” He chanted her name, and sucked her skin like he could suck out her heart. 

She arched her neck, throwing her head back, and squeezing her eyes shut as his mouth dragged down her collarbones and seared heat into the hill of her breasts. She curved her back, feeling the press of his stump into the small cave above the swell of her ass. 

He was inside her, thrusting up into her again and again and again, like a thing possessed. He made her writhe and cry out as he drank from her skin, ravenous for her heat and touch. He’d been there all along, her Gwindor, hiding in the curl of his tongue, locked in the smoke of his spine. 

And then she made the mistake of looking down at his ruined face twisted in pleasure. She gagged, and wanted to yank up her innards, slowly, for the revulsion. How could she react so shallowly to his ugliness? But she had. 

She covered the hole of her mouth; it was a mercy his eyes were closed. She twisted her face away, scrunched her eyes, trying to erase the memory of the face of the one who took her. She fought to sink back into the pleasure she’d felt at his feral touch. But it was gone. 

He was not finished though, and she found herself throw back-first onto the couch, Gwindor tumbling after her, his weight pressing into the crook of her legs and spreading them wider for his access. He kept on going, panting above her, his kisses sharp with teeth, his hand holding her hips from slipping away as he sought frantic release inside her. She did nothing to stop him from riding out his desperate pleasure within her, though she wanted to flee from herself. 

He shook inside his skin, hand finishing in her hair. “Finduilas,” he breathed against her cheek, and he smiled. He smiled a smile more beautiful than a newborn sun’s, because he’d not smiled like that since he rode away to lose himself in the North. But the smile was a sword through her lungs. And he saw, he knew something was amiss. He unloosed her hair, his smile wilted, shoulders curling back in on themselves, and though they still touched skin-to-skin, he ran a million miles away. 

She slipped from beneath him, straightened her dress, felt the sticky heat of his seed between her thighs. “Gwindor.” She had a cactus for a heart, and didn’t know how to unstitch this mess when she hid in the dark, devouring herself.

“Just go, Finduilas.” He did not look at her. 

She fled.

*

Locating Gwindor proved to be a challenge. She’d gone to his rooms first, and then the Sunset Garden which he favored for its privacy. She’d even asked her father if he’d assigned Gwindor some duty (he’d looked at her as if she’d taken a step outside reason). She found him sitting in the dirt, leaning against one of the fence poles of a paddock.

Her steps trailed to nothing. He stared at the earth in his clenched hand, watching with a child’s fascination as he slowly let it sift out the end of his fist. “Gwindor?”

His head snapped up like a deer hearing the howling of wolves. His eyes were wild at the edges; it extenuated their Otherness. She forced herself to hold them, though she wanted to flinch away from their animalistic sheen and silt cat-pupils (not Orc, she wouldn’t make that comparison). 

She took careful steps towards him. When she reached his side and he had not fled from her, she asked: “May I sit beside you?”

The wildness had receded from his eyes, but he was still bruising the earth between his fingertips. “Finduilas.” Just her name, as if reminding himself who she was.

“Yes, it is me, Finduilas.” A horse whinnied behind them, and he started violently. “Just a playful colt.” 

If she had been a different person, a better person, she would know how to ease the shadows from of his eyes. But if she was a better person she wouldn’t have stolen that precious smile from his mouth; they would be laying entwined together on a bed every night in quiet rapture as he traced the cup of her cheek like it was something sacred, and he would never have to face another night alone.

She didn’t know how to fix him, and she wasn’t here now because she was trying. She was here because she was afraid. When she’d set out to find him she’d convinced herself this would be good for him (as if lies ever fixed anything). But now, looking at him sitting in the dirt beside her, the web of self-deceit crumbled. 

They sat in silence, the horses playing behind them, the clouds winging across the sky like the tails of tadpoles. Minutes crawled by like inchworms, and there was nothing like easy comfort in the way their shoulders almost brushed, and their hands lay side-by-side in the dirt.

Gwindor stirred, gaze turning to trace the curves of her profile. “What are you doing here?” The question was gnawed to the bone.

“I am being a coward, as usual.”

He looked away, and her pores could breathe easier. Then, after so long a pause the words were generic: “You are not a coward.” 

She laughed like thorns were stuck in the back of her throat. 

“Why are you here, Finduilas?” he asked again.

Her eyes released the sky and took him inside their cage. “I came to tell you I am carrying your child. I came to deceive you.”

His mouth curved in something that was the opposite of joy. “Ah. I see. It makes sense now.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I wondered why you did it. Now I understand. I should have known it was nothing else. I am a pathetic fool, aren’t I?” He turned his eerie eyes on her. They were so tired, so listless, so far beyond betrayed.

She would never tear the shame off her back and become something raw and whole. She would never scrub all the sins out of her skin. She tried anyway. “No! This has nothing to do with—it was not—that was a mistake!” He flinched. “The timing! The timing was a mistake, not—” Everything came out in a knot.

He folded his legs, pushing off the ground with his hand. 

“No, wait!” She latched onto him, her weight toppling his unsteady rise and sending him crashing to the earth. 

“Let me go.” He said it quiet as a sword slicing through air in the dark.

“Just listen!” But she took her hands off him. “I did not go there that day to deceive you. If you never believe another word I speak, then believe that. I swear, Gwindor, I swear. I had no intention of passing off the child as yours or even lying with you.” 

“So that was not a lie. Just this.”

She cringed. “I was afraid. It just seemed the easier path. I thought…I thought if you believed the child was yours it might, might give you something to live for, or just…but I do not think even I believed that. Not really. And then I found you here and…”

“Who is the father?”

She could lie (again), and this would be the less selfish lie, but she couldn’t say an untruth with him looking at her in that bitter way. “Adanedhel.” 

Gwindor’s eyes flashed with pain, as if he’d taken a knife through the ribs, before he clamped down on the display. He said in a voice struggling against a strangle: “The One help me, I still love you, though Morgoth has laid my life in ruin. I release you from our betrothal; go where your heart leads you. But Adanedhel is not Beren. A doom lies on him, and I would not see you led into it. Your love shall betray you to bitterness and death. For though he is indeed as he named himself, bloodstained son of ill-fate, his right name is Túrin son of Húrin, whom Morgoth holds in Angband, and whose kin he has cursed. Doubt not the power of Morgoth Bauglir! Is it not written in me?”* 

Finduilas’ fingers pressed into her abdomen, her eyes cast down and her heart ringing with the same foreboding Gwindor spoke of. But then she cast the foreshadowing away. Gwindor was given to fatalism. If Morgoth had cursed Túrin, then he had done a poor job of it, for Túrin had ignited hope in the hearts of the Nargothrondrim. He had relit their glory of old, and his light and prowess had carried them from the shadows of fear. These were not the signs of a curse, but a blessing.

She said none of this to Gwindor, for he was stubborn in his pessimism. To his fear that she had surrendered her heart to a Mortal she said: “Túrin loves me not, nor will he. But neither do I love him.” 

“Then your design was to have me claim the child and wed you?”

She winced from the words; they sounded so cold and calculating, truth though they were. “When I came to you that day I had intended to tell you. I had planned to accept the disgrace, and…” But she hadn’t told him, and her fear had led her to hurt him more. She looked down at her hands upon her stomach. “I did not plan this. I have acted shamefully, but I did not mean to cause you pain.” 

Her fingers trembled at the knowledge of what lay ahead for her. It wasn’t the judging eyes sneering at her from the future; it was that her father would have to be told, and without a naming of the man who’d planted his seed within her all the shame of the pregnancy would fall upon her head, and through her, her family. Her only other path was leaving Nargothrond, perhaps seek the Havens of Sirion, but that would mean leaving her father behind and raising a child among strangers in a strange land. 

Her heart was a hummingbird in her chest; it beat a staccato against her ribs. 

Gwindor touched her sleeve (not her skin), and drew her gaze to him. “I will claim the child.”

“You...” Her throat closed on the sand coating it. “You would do that? Marry me even though—”

“No. I will not marry you. I would not bind you to what I have become.”

“But if you claim the child without the proper recompense for—”

“I know I shall carry the disgrace, but do you honestly believe I can fall much further from grace?”

“The lords will turn no ear to your counsels. My father will—”

“They head me none at all as it is. It will make little difference if I am the ex-thrall or the blackguard who led the king’s daughter astray.”

“No. No, if you are going to save me, then I am not going to take your hand only to pull you in after me. I will not have it said that Gwindor son of Guilin was the kind of man who forsook a woman when he had taken what he wanted from her. I will not steal your honor.” Honor was the most priceless currency, the easiest to lose, and once lost it was near impossible to regain.

“Only I can lose it. But it is not my honor I will lose, Finduilas. It is my reputation, for which I care nothing.”

“I tell you I will _not_ allow you to drown in my place! If you would save me from my own folly, then you will have to marry me, Gwindor.”

His jaw worked, but she would not yield to his self-sacrificing plans. “If your father agrees,” he tacked on one last barrier before agreeing to shackle her.

“Gwindor—” She wanted to stitch her love on her sleeve, and tell Gwindor he was the most honorable man who’d ever walked Arda. She wanted to tell him he was a thousand times too good for a wretch like her. She wanted to tell him that in this moment she looked through the ruin of his face and glimpsed the soul of her Gwindor underneath. “Thank you.” 

She took his hand. He allowed the touch though he wanted to pull away. They were a paltry set of words, utterly insignificant in the face of what he’d done for her, of the magnificence of who he was. Her fingers squeezed his bones and thought them ocean bones: beautiful, incalculable, divine.


	78. Chapter 64

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 64

“You have it.” Orodreth sealed his approval to the match, surprising Finduilas with the swiftness of his consent. She’d thought it would be a wrestle, given the shameful nature of her condition, though she’d been determined to hold out until her father agreed.

“Even though…” Finduilas touched her stomach.

Orodreth shocked her by smiling. There was a rose garden tucked into the curve of his lips. “It is not how I would have chosen to hear of my first grandchild’s coming arrival, but as Gwindor will honor his duty, I will speak no more words about it. However,” his expression sobered, “you should not expect the same acceptance from most. I hold Gwindor in the highest regard, and always will. The same cannot be said for everyone.”

“You do not blame Gwindor, or think the less of him?” She voiced her greatest fear in the arrangement.

Orodreth rose from his desk, circling to sink into the seat beside her. “Finduilas…” Then, because her father may lack the words, but never the courage, he continued, “I know the child is not Gwindor’s.” She sucked a breath. “Gwindor is a man of unbreachable honor. And you, my dear one.” He touched her cheek, his fingers hesitant. Her father was not given to sentimentality, and his voice turned gruff. “Have been hurting for a very long time. And I did not know how to reach you. You went far away; you are still far away.” He dropped the touch.

Finduilas’ cheek felt cold, like her heart. “I did not think…I did not wish to burden you with my trivialities.”

“Trivialities? No, I do not think they are. But I fear I have been much consumed with my own struggles and grief, and was blind to the fullness of yours. How can you ever forgive me for failing you so?”

“No, Father!” Her fingers clenched around the armrest. “There is nothing to forgive.”

“There is much.” He sighed, looking away, and it seemed a physical weight stamped itself into his shoulders. His hair still curled about his neck in that youthful way of its, and he still wore the unassuming garb of a soldier without the accents of jewels and embroidered silks, but the years of rule pressed heavy upon him. 

The contrast to the lightness of his bearing these last few months was stark. She had not realized how great a force of rejuvenation Túrin had been for her father, as he had become for all Nargothrond. The air was freer, the light more brilliant, the shadow’s cat-tails clipped. She would not see her father bowed again with self-blame as he had been after Mother and Uncle Finrod’s deaths.

She took his hand in hers, pulling him out of his darkening thoughts. “Father, it is enough to know you will love this child regardless of its parentage. I am content.” She lied, but prayed he could not read it in her eyes.

He touched the back of her hand, the lamplight caught in the corners of his eyes, reforging the brown to gold. Her dear papa, did he realize how extraordinary she thought him? He was no great king, not even a very good one, but he was unchanged by power and the immense wealth of a kingdom at his fingertips. He was as self-effacing and abhorring of show as ever. He swayed no hearts with mighty speeches, could not even turn his council to his will most days, but he was steadfast in his pursuit of justice, uncorrupted by power. Even his enemies, the Fëanorions, he had ever dealt fairly with and never once crowed over their banishment though many ‘great kings’ would have done so readily. 

Finduilas hugged this moment to herself, wanting to remember her papa like this always: a golden-eyed creature so unassuming he was ignorant of his own greatness.

“Of course I will love the child, Finduilas. Do you think I would cast blame upon an innocent, or turn my back on a child of my blood? It would not matter if you told me the child’s father was Curufin Fëanorion. I would still love it, and you, my daughter.” 

There was a skinned bird in her chest, its torn feathers and blood smearing the walls of her throat on its way up. She let out the sound of a lung collapsing. She couldn’t breathe, her chest, crushed, icicles spearing her heart. There were hollows inside her. She’d put them there with her own hands, one mistake after another until she whirled in circles, looking for a way out, but all the doors were sealed, all the windows too high. 

Her elbow crook ache, ache, ached for a downy-head it would never hold. Her son. Her Túranno. Where had he gone?

She’d hurt a man with hands eternal as the sea, her palms slipping into his the closest thing to heaven she’d ever known. She’d torn the smile off his face. She’d driven him out to bruise the earth in his fists.

She’d given ear to the seductive call of a siren, and she’d ruined her own life. She’d sent the one she loved away (reeled him back in). And then, when they told her he was dead, she sought out hands to make her hurt, hurt enough to bring him back, please, please, please. 

“Finduilas, what is wrong? Are you injured? Tell me what has happened?”

She folded into herself and keened. Her father petted her hair, stroked the shaking hill of her back. She pressed her face into his arm, fingers digging into flesh, but could not speak. Would not. The revelation that her father would have accepted Túranno was the final boulder atop the mountain in her past. So many regrets. She would speak of none of them. Their weight pressing her into the ground was her punishment.

Her father never stopped asking her to tell him what was wrong, though the questions alternated between pleas for her to speak and strings of ‘forgive me’s,’ seeing her violent reaction as a sign of his failure that she should doubt his unconditional love for her and hers. Even her mourning hurt the ones she loved.

* 

Túrin wore power like a crown. He walked into a room and heads turned like bees buzzing around sweet nectar. They wanted to look at him not only because he was handsome, but because he had the air of a man who was going to do something momentous any minute and they didn’t want to miss it. Worlds could have ridden between the blades of his shoulders, and he would have born the weight, head thrown back with pride.

Gwindor was helpless to stop the boulder of destruction rolling towards Nargothrond, preparing to smash her under its inescapable weight. Túrin stood at the head of the council table opposite Orodreth, a sign of his risen status to the high-general of all Nargothrond’s forces. He was the Mormegil now, the Black Blade who had driven the Enemy out of the Guarded Plain and back into the desolation of the North. He had set the lights in the Great Hall dancing again, the laughter tinkling in all Nargothrond’s corners, and placed pride and daring upon her brow like crowing his queen. She was his, and she adored him as she once had Finrod (before she’d stabbed her king in the back; fickle mistress).

“With a permanent bridge across the river gorge we could more easily protect the Eastern Provinces,” Túrin argued. “Our cavalry could move swiftly through the plain, able to respond to attacks with greater speed, and we could send larger companies of foot soldiers out if we did not have to ferry ever soldier across the river!”

Gwindor, for once, was not the only lord speaking out against Túrin’s newest scheme. The ghost of Finrod sat in the corner, watching them plot his kingdom’s downfall. Finrod’s words echoed in their ears when centuries before others had purposed the same construction Túrin now pushed. Nargothrond’s power lay in its secret nature, in the doubt it planed in the Enemy’s mind, the fear of their unknown strength. Give him a bridge to their heart and all second-guesses were void.

Orodreth gave Túrin his ear though, for he too favored open-combat, and longed for the days of old when Minas Tirith’s towers gleamed with the white-teeth of defiance, and her arms flexed brawny and bold against the North. “Do not take the counsel of your fears. Too long have we walked with its chains about our ankles, crippling us, dragging us into the mud. No longer!”

Mummers of agreement rose in favor of their king’s words. Powerful elegance from Orodreth was rare, and only ever shinned when there was a battle to be won. 

Gwindor could not sit silent as his countrymen plotted their own destruction. “Is it fear or prudence that stays our hand? Was Finrod Felagund ever named craven? And yet he counseled against this very juncture. If we do this thing we draw Morgoth’s eye down upon us. Do not lightly call his full strength to our gates! Better we fight this war as we did in the years of King Finrod, with honor and steadfast hearts, but not recklessness!”

Túrin’s hands fisted, pressing into the table as fury blackened his irises at being denied. His pride ruled him, and he spat at Gwindor: “Your despair is an extravagance we cannot afford!”

“Túrin,” Orodreth’s voice was steady and cool as forest shade, but Túrin did not head it.

“Your words are cowardice. Is this truly Gwindor, Prince of Nargothrond, speaking thus? For it is no prince of the mighty Noldor I hear in your words, but that of a thrall who has known the pits of Angband and shivers at the threat of retuning should we fall!”

Tap, tap, tap.

Gwindor’s neck swiveled, seeking the sound. He knew that sound, knew it like the bottom of his tongue.

“Been slacking off, slave? My whip’s been whining for fresh flesh. Yours don’t look so good, but it’ll do, oh yes, it’ll do.”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Got some entrainment for the lads tonight? This one been givin’ you trouble in the shafts?”

“Oh yes, we’ll find some games to play, won’t we, pretty?”

Their eyes, they were like his. They flared in the dark as if they still horded a piece of Elven fëa _, but it was only the gleam of a predator. Hands, teeth, whips on him, breath promising vile deeds in his ear, chains on his wrists, he couldn’t get them off, and those hands were tearing at his flesh, his hair, his ragged trousers, striping him naked in the dark. They were coming for him, he’d never escape, they promised, promised, promised. “The Lord always knows; he sees all. Once he wraps his eyes about you, you can never get free.”_

_Hands, hands, hands on him! Get them off, get them off, get them—_

_“Gwindor, Gwindor!” Hand on his shoulder, calloused, tipped in blunt nails, hot as Túrin’s always were against his skin, sailing him home. “Gwindor, look at me.” Hot hand cupping his chin, tilting his face up to Túrin’s eyes, all the pride and anger shaken out of them._

_Gwindor shook in the cradle of those fingers._

_“Come on, let’s get you out of here.” The buzzing of voices in the corners of his ears, faces weaving by, mouths appalled, eyes suspicious. Túrin’s arms around his shoulders, the front of his waist, supporting him as his feet scrambled to learn how to walk again. Finally a door sealed the buzzing out, and a bench to sink down upon, his aching knees sighing in thanks._

_Túrin’s fingers in his hair, combing it back like a father his child’s. His naked voice in Gwindor’s ear: “Forgive me. I should not have spoken to you like that. I do not know why I even said it. I—”_

_Gwindor’s fingers (like an Orc’s) curved around Túrin’s elbow, feeling the beginning of a hard bicep and the delicate shape of bone. “You spoke in anger. It is forgiven.”_

_“But I had no reason to be angry. You said nothing, nothing, to warrant it!”_

_“You grieve.” Gwindor spoke of the root of Túrin’s often roused ire. He had never shared his thoughts with his friend before. What was the use when it would change nothing? Beleg was dead, and Túrin was furious. His hatred and vengeance against Morgoth was a crutch for the crippling guilt underneath. There was rage against the world there too, against a curse hounding him. He raged against the bars of the cage closing in about him, and always the guilt waited for him in the corner like a vulture circling until it could peck at him when at his weakest._

_Túrin had murdered the love of his life, his best friend, his brother, his Beleg._

_Túrin’s fingers convulsed in the hollow of Gwindor’s collarbone, digging in while the tremor of an earthquake shook him. It passed, and Túrin gritted his teeth against further weakness. “That does not excuse the way to spoke to you. Especially in public. You have been treated poorly at every turn. I just wish you could understand the importance of meeting Morgoth in open combat. We _must_ fight back or we will fall in the shadows. I will choose my own end, and it will be with a sword in my hand and my foes fleeing before my face!”_

_Gwindor sighed. “Valor is the currency of the whole, Túrin. I have no more to sell. If that makes me a coward, than I am a coward. But I will fight against your counsel. I am already reviled; I have no reputation to be stripped of. But you, Túrin,” Gwindor met Túrin’s eyes with his next words. “Is this about meeting death honorably, or about seeking it out?” Túrin scowled, looking away. “It is as I feared, then. You search for death.”_

_“And if I do?” Túrin lifted his chin. “Will you tell me Beleg would not have wanted that? Will you try to mend with words that which was torn long ago?”_

_Gwindor smiled bitterly. “If the right words could heal wounds, do you think I would not have searched for them? No, I will not tell you Beleg would not have wished this, because you already know that. I cannot even give you the comfort of his soul awaiting your coming in death.”_

_“You are right: there is no comfort to be had.” Túrin unfolded himself from Gwindor’s side, rising tall and fierce and hard. “Better to grasp fate in my fist and choose my own death. And let it come swiftly for I grow weary of waiting!”_

_Túrin left him, striding away like a lord of hearts and minds._

_Orodreth found him not long after, still nursing the empty comfort of marble against the backs of his knees. “Gwindor,” Orodreth sat where Túrin had. His frame was light and slender next to Túrin’s power. Wisps of curls brushed his brow, curved about his ears. “I hope you are well.”_

_Gwindor’s mouth twisted. ‘Well,’ that was a tall order. “Seeing as I have just been huddling and whimpering in the corner like a terrified child before the entire Council of Lords I suppose you find me well enough.”_

_Orodreth’s gaze was grave, yet free of pity. Gwindor wished he’d swallowed the self-mocking words back. “In one month’s time you will be my son-in-law. May I speak to you as such, and not as your king? For I would not have words I meant in counsel taken as command.”_

_Gwindor nodded his consent._

_“I will not pretend to understand what you have been through. Nor will I offer false platitudes that you have not been changed by the horrors you have endured. You have not conquered these horrors, but nor have you succumbed to them, and that in itself is a triumph. But I will speak plainly now: I urge you to step down from the Council of Lords. Your words are not heeded, nor will they be as long as your voice clashes against Túrin’s. All you are accomplishing is your own sorrow and distress, and I cannot see how this will assist your healing.”_

_“My healing?” Gwindor’s voice twisted roots of bitterness into the words. “What healing is that? You come to me, and tell me I am as useless as the nattering of a gossiping fishmonger.” He stood, his height diminished, but enough to tower over Orodreth’s seated form. “Don’t fear, my lord, I shall not infect your council rooms with my presence again.”_

_Gwindor snapped around, so much fury and heaviness in his throat it was hard to breathe. Orodreth arrested his hand. “I spoke to you as a friend. If you wish to return to council in the morning, then I shall welcome your presence, for I give weight to your words even if my heart turns to Túrin’s. But if you go tomorrow be warned, because others will dismiss you with ease, naming you unstable, your words irrational, on account of what occurred in the chamber today. You do not wish to be pitied; well there is the plain truth.”_

_Gwindor couldn’t get air through his lungs. The air smelt like walls closing-in. He yanked away from Orodreth, he needed to get out of here, get somewhere he could draw breath._

_There were whips cracking at his heels. _(Dance, slave, dance!)_ , chains so heavy about his wrists he could feel the imprint of iron eating into his flesh ( _You’ll never be free, Light-eater. You’ll stay down here in the dark until you start grinding rocks between your teeth like those stunted Stone-eaters. Anything to fill your belly! And then you’ll start eating your own fatty juices. Mmm sounds tasty, doesn’t it?_ )_

_He didn’t stop running until there was earth under his fingers and sunlight crisping his skin. Only then did his lungs exhale, and the nightmares slip back under the fence. He pulled out a handful of grass and stuffed it into his mouth. Life. Green. He ate it just to prove the voices wrong. See, see? He was free. He was free. There were bite marks on the tender undersides of his arms, but he was _free_._

_*_

_Gildor inhaled the open-air, tasting the river-breeze, and felt it trickle down his throat like a butterfly. He glanced over his shoulder at Thangear who followed. “On a day like this, the banks will be so packed with gawkers it is a wonder Celebrimbor will get any work done!”_

_Thangear settled a hand on the pommel of his sword (he always went armed, as if he still trailed in the shadow of his king). “I pity the fools who get in that one’s way. He is prickly as a thorn bush when his work gets interrupted. I have seen him tear the arm off an unfortunate servant who disturbed him in his den.”_

_Gildor snorted. Thangear grinned at him. His feet strolled after Gildor at exactly the pace they chose, and his hips tipped in that ridiculous swagger of his. Gildor asked: “Did you see the contraption Celebrimbor build? That monstrous crane? I have never seen the like.”_

_“It is a Northern invention.” Thangear was always in the know somehow, though Gildor spent more time in the kitchens than he, so where he got all the best gossip Gildor was stumped. “The Fëanorions invented it to haul up the rocks for their fortresses. Handy things.”_

_“Ah, the Fëanorions, of course.” Gildor smiled with the words. The Fëanorions and their people had dwelt long enough in Nargothrond for a local set of jokes to build up around their natures._

_Thangear smirked back, the slender pendent in his ear swinging. The crystal flashed in the sunlight. The people of Nargothrond often forgot Thangear had once been one of Finrod’s sworn-companions, and was a master-swordsman. The sword buckled to his hip was overlooked as a decorative piece while their eyes caught on the audacity of his dress._

_Today Thangear had sheathed his legs in tight, buttercup-yellow leggings, and wore a shockingly blue tunic with _ruffles_ on the collar cut several inches short of propriety’s approval. It was easy to forget Thangear had once melted into the shadows and walked with the presence of a threat at Finrod’s shoulder. _

_Thangear had loved Finrod, but Gildor didn’t think he would have chosen the life of a sworn-companion if it hadn’t displeased his family so (Thangear lived to upset). Swearing himself to Finrod was an outward expression of the rebellion in his heart against the expectations upon him as a Noldo heir to a lordship; but more, against the society telling him he had to hide what he was like a dirty secret. Thangear was a lover of men. He flaunted it, and had been disinherited for it._

_“Look, there’s Gwindor and Finduilas!” Gildor spotted the newlyweds from his view upon the High Wall. The couple sat far below in the terraced gardens cutting into the hill’s side. Gildor leapt onto the step above the gutter in the paved stones, and waved at the two figures. “Hello!”_

_Finduilas raised her eyes from the book she’d been reading, searching for the hailer. Gwindor’s eyes had already found him, and his lips twitched at Gildor’s exuberant greeting from the wall above. Finduilas spotted him and returned the wave with much more dignity. Gildor could see the swell of her belly even from this distance –only a few more months now._

_A party of Elves passed behind Gildor, and he heard their snickers and snide comments about their ‘prince’s’ behavior. Gildor tossed hair out of his eyes, crooking a look back at them, and flashed them a cheeky smile with dimples. The women blushed and the men frowned, pulling their ladies away._

_“Beautiful day isn’t it!” Gildor called after them. Some of the women looked back. Gildor settled his hip against the wall, crossed his arms loosely over his chest, and held the smile as the wind tugged his loose hair like the pale wings of a moth. The women giggled, poking each other in the ribs._

_Thangear snickered. “Collecting new admires, Prince Gildor?”_

_Gildor jumped off his perch with a laugh. “I couldn’t resist.”_

_“Of course you couldn’t, why should you? Bunch of simple-minded fools anyway.” Thangear’s lip curled in the direction of the retreating Elves._

_Gildor shrugged. He was done sparing time on those who picked gleefully at other’s oddities, and cast his gaze back over the wall. Finduilas had raised her book again, angling it to catch a full glass of sunlight on its pages. Gwindor sat unsmiling beside her, but at least he’d left his rooms and was spending time with his new wife. “Do you think this will be good for him?”_

_Thangear leaned his elbows on his wall, cupping his pointed chin. “It can hardly get worse.”_

_Gildor sighed. “I thought, when they first announced the coming marriage and the baby, it would give him something to live for again. But I haven’t noticed any change. If anything, without the council to distract him, he’s fallen further from the path of recovery.”_

_“He was never walking that path.”_

_Gildor frowned. “He was. For a time.”_

_“No, he was just pretending, trying to ignore what had happened to him. It’s caught up with him now. But I do agree with you, the council gave him some distraction; perhaps not a good one though. His moods were ever dark after leaving them.”_

_“He didn’t even smile at the marriage ceremony. But Orodreth kept it private, so I don’t think it was an entirely unpleasant affair for him. Do you?”_

_Thangear pushed off his elbows, sweeping his braids off his chest with a flourish. “He didn’t look like a man anticipating a wild night.”_

_Gildor wrinkled his nose. “I was trying to have a serious conversation here!”_

_Thangear raised a brow, “So was I.”_

_Gildor shook his head, striking off down the path again. “I just hate how hopeless it seems. I wish there was something I could do to help him.”_

_Thangear’s silver-tipped boots clicked beside him. “If you pull from our experience with other thralls, then the statistics show little hope. However, that does not say there have been no thralls who have fallen in the range of relative recovery.”_

_“And which of those can say they suffered as long as Gwindor?”_

_“None, unless we were to count Lord Maedhros, but since we have no insight into any but his public face, I would not place him in any group.”_

_“But you still have hope.” Gildor turned thirsty eyes on Thangear. He knew better than to underestimate Thangear, but Thangear still surprised him with his perception at times. Thangear was disillusioned with the splendor of life’s porcelain mask, and yet was not jaded._

_Thangear’s mouth crooked. “My family are all members of the Order of the Faith. Some of my most vivid memories of childhood revolve around rigid religious ceremonies. It was a continuous drudge of how I, _others_ , weren’t measuring up. Everything, every action, every thought, had a right way and a wrong way of being done. My childhood taught me religion was for the petty-minded. I learned no differently from observing the Sons of Eru or the Keepers of Light. Then I met him,” Thangear jerked his chin back to where they’d left Gwindor. “Nothing he did was about religion; and yet he prayed to The One and believed in the ‘glorious Symphony.’ But his prayers weren’t like the regurgitated ones of the Order of the Faith, or the expectant ones of the Sons of Eru. His were simple thanksgivings, with no expectations of hopes and dreams answered.”_

_Gildor’s voice was soft as the brushing of lips. “Everywhere Gwindor looked he saw the beauty of the world and said this was Eru’s gift to us.”_

_“All the beauty in the world can’t unmake the ugliness. But even now he clings to hope.”_

_“Yes, Gwindor still has his Estel.”_

_“That is why I do not think our hope should be buried. If any can conquer the horrors of Angband, it will be him.”_

_They finished the trek down to the river in silence. Thangear’s strut not the least subdued for the solemnity of their conversation. His earring swung in time to the beat of his strides. Gildor smiled to himself, feeling light out here in the sun with his brazen companion and words of hope spiking up his spine. His arms swung at his sides, neck tilted back to net the breeze in his hair and lift it off his nape._

_As they drew closer to the gorge’s opening and the roaring rapids below, the sounds of the ongoing construction carried on the wind: shouted orders, hammers swinging, gears straining, and the grunts of Elves putting their back into the labor. The towering crane the Fëanorions had built for the lifting of the heavy stones rose like an obelisk on the bank._

_It was as Gildor predicted; the flat land between the hill’s feet and the gorge’s mouth was scattered with idle Elves come to watch the day’s progress on Túrin’s much anticipated bridge. Well, Celebrimbor’s bridge really, since he was the one heading the endeavor, and it was his people whose hands were cutting the stones and slapping the mortar (much to the protest of Nargothrond’s Engineers Guild, but Orodreth had wanted the best, and the Fëanorions were it)._

_“I see even these idlers aren’t completely witless,” Thangear nodded to the conspicuous semicircle of breathing-room the watchers had afforded the laboring Fëanorion craftsfolk._

_Gildor laughed as he watched a cluster of watchers take several hasty steps back when Celebrimbor prowled too close. Celebrimbor appeared oblivious to any presence but his workers, but Gildor knew just how cutting that tongue became when Celebrimbor’s limited patience was imposed upon. But Celebrimbor’s presence was not something he’d sought out since the shape of Celebrimbor’s mouth (exactly like his father’s, but with none of its cruelness) imprinted the taste of Curufin’s in his mind._

_Whoops and cheers floated up from the river below, and Gildor’s attention was draw upstream to where a raft bursting with Elves raced down from the rapids above. “Looks like someone’s been enjoying themselves!” he laughed, remembering the many times he’d braved the rapids in merrier times past._

_“Thrill-riders,” Thangear said without derision. Thangear could appreciate the need for seemingly frivolous enjoyments even in times of war. Others would have scorned the rapid-rafting Elves for indulging a tradition of peacetime._

_Gildor first rode the rapids with Rístang when they were many years short of the approved age. They’d snuck away from Gelmir, leaving their studies behind, and wangled the raft-keepers into letting them buy passage with a group of adults preparing a raft for their own adventure. Gelmir and Father had been furious, but it was worth it for the exhilaration of boulders speeding past, threatening to crush their skulls in, while river-water soaked their clothing, blinding them, and flooding into their laughing mouths._

_Rístang had left with her betrothed years ago for Doriath. They’d written in years passed, before the North fell and causal correspondence became impractical. The last he’d heard from her, she’d been deep into plans with her husband of abandoning Beleriand for the East. He didn’t expect his own path to ever lead him across the Ered Luin, and doubted he’d see her again._

_“They’re leaving you know.” Thangear startled him by saying._

_“Who’s leaving?”_

_“The Fëanorions.”_

_“I’ve heard nothing of this! Where did you hear this rumor?”_

_“From a Fëanorion,” Thangear smirked at him. “It’s not a rumor, it’s a fact; just one most of Nargothrond is ignorant of as yet. When the bridge is complete, Celebrimbor will take his people to the Havens of Sirion.”_

_“Why leave just when things are getting better?”_

_Thangear threw himself down on the grass, cocky limbs sprawled. It was as good a place as any, better even, for they were far enough from the building site to avoid snappish craftsfolk. Gildor sat next to him. “That assessment depends on what you consider better.”_

_Gildor’s mouth tightened. Gwindor wasn’t shy with his opinion of the encroaching end spinning quicker and quicker to find them. “I’ve ridden out with Túrin many times. I’ve witnessed the strength of our army, walked fields long held under the Enemy’s dominion. Morgoth will strike us as Gwindor predicts, but,” he swung the eyes of one young enough to hope in the triumph of good over the Darkness to Thangear, “when Morgoth comes we will be ready for him! And we will defeat him! We have the Mormegil, the Dragon-Helm, and we have Nargothrond with her deep caverns and Dwarven-gates, and we have our courage back, our hope!”_

_Thangear laughed, shaking his head at Gildor’s enthusiasm. “Ah, Gildor! If only the rest of the world had your faith in it.”_

_Gildor smiled, though he recognized the color of gentle mockery in Thangear’s words. Thangear thought him naïve, but most people did; Gildor was used to its taste. He was no great lord who understood all the fracture lines, every possible pitfall, and could predict the direction the pendulum would swing. Maybe it was naiveté at the root of his optimism, but better to live with hope than take up the cup of pessimism and leach the light out of the world._


	79. Chapter 65

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Note: I was influenced in my writing of the atmosphere preceding the Nirnaeth Arnoediad by Keiliss’s stunning story “The Boys of Summer.” If you haven’t had a chance to read this one, you should. It’s amazing!

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 65

Year 493 of the First Age (two years before the Fall of Nargothrond)

Finduilas had finally made a choice she didn’t regret: she hadn’t let Gwindor drown in her place. She hadn’t chosen the easy path, the path of safety that would have shuffled Gwindor before her like a shield while she cowered in safety behind his sacrifice. Each day was a struggle, but she never looked back or wished she hadn’t linked their fingers together and had their wrists bound in the white silk of a Joining Ribbon. She looked into his eyes every day and found grace.

It had been the start, the first rib cracked into place in her re-making. Others had come, other choices she did not regret. She’d carried a child, still full of doubts, but she’d raised a daughter who’d become one of the cushions easing the past until all her jagged pieces no longer ground against each other and those around her. She said she was content, and it wasn’t a lie.

Túranno could never be replaced. Finduilas still smelt his baby-soft skin when she slept, longing for what was lost. But she’d grown a girl inside her, filling all her crooks. She laid her hand on her womb as she lay down to sleep, and dreamt a name: Thóriel. 

She grew a girl with foal limbs, rainy eyes, and a mouth like Túrin’s –sharp and hard until it lit a bonfire in your cheekbones with a single smile. Her daughter would have the heart of an eagle, endless grey inside her, and lips of brine. A fist of gold encased in stone.

Thóriel was none of those things yet. She was just a child of three years sprouting up too quickly for prolonged deception, who always had the biggest grins for her mama, adored her grandpapa Orodreth, and watched her papa as if he’d hung the moon. 

It couldn’t last, the comments would start soon, but Finduilas refused to be driven out of her home and from her family by a bit of foul air stinking up the place. She was different now, stronger. Her tree trunk limbs weren’t knotted at the center; they could carry her weight. 

When Thóriel was a baby, her mixed blood had passed unnoted. Elven and Mortal children grew at similar rates in their tender years. But Elfling’s growth slowed around their third year and Thóriel’s had not. The Mortal-blood was strong in her.

Finduilas was no longer afraid of the inevitable future, not for herself. But she did fear for the childhood stretching out before her soon-to-be-openly-illegitimate child. And for Gwindor. He was tripping and falling as it was.

Today was a good day for him. He’d volunteered to watch Thóriel while Finduilas attended her duties as Lady of Nargothrond. Finduilas never refused Gwindor when he asked for time with their daughter, though there were occasions when her heart misgave her (something too-close to fear in Thóriel’s eyes when she saw her father on the bad days). But Thóriel was increasingly the only thing that could get Gwindor out of bed, and Finduilas couldn’t steal even a spark of joy from his life. He had so little now.

Finduilas’ brisk stride carried her to Gwindor’s chambers. They hadn’t attempted to share rooms since he’d attacked her in the grips of a nightmare when she’d been with child. The separation had been Gwindor’s idea –his demand. She put her palm on the door’s handle and a chill slithered down her spine. It was too quite, like the falling of snow in the midnight hour.

She thrust the door open, and tried to disguise the alarm in her footsteps, not wanting to distress Gwindor; but there was no need for caution because her husband was nowhere in sight. The room was a wreck. Dishes shattered on the floor, food staining the wall where they’d collided. The low table was overturned, and it looked like someone had punched the canvas painting of the Noldor’s triumphant march into Endor with the sun’s rising.

Someone sniffled under the meal table, curled into a tinny ball like a terrified bunny. Thóriel. Finduilas was on her knees in an instant. “It’s Mama, dearest, come out to Mama.”

“Mama!” The little ball uncurled and threw itself into her arms. She clasped Thóriel to her breast, wrapping her arms around her shaking, crying child. 

“Hush, love, I’m here now; I’m here.”

It took too long to dry the tears. Any amount of time would have been too long to see her daughter weeping. After the tears had run their course, Thóriel fell into an exhausted sleep. Finduilas laid her down in the side room, tucking a blanket around her shoulders, and soothing a hand over frizzy black curls. 

She stood, closed the door softly, and leaned her forehead against the warmth of its wood. She waited until she’d cooled the worst of her anger, before walking to Gwindor’s bedroom door. She knew he was in there. She tried the handle first, jangling it, but it was locked. Her fist came up to pound on the door. “Gwindor! Gwindor!”

There was a creaking sound from the other side (he was probably in bed). A shuffling of bare feet on stones, the turning of a lock, and then Gwindor’s pallid face starkly pale against the backdrop of blackness beyond.

Finduilas took a deep breath, struggling, struggling. She waited to speak until she could do so without unleashing a whip. Finally, with only the edge of a bite she said, “Gwindor, would you explain to me why I found our daughter crying under the table in a room that looks like men have been brawling?”

Gwindor frowned, so much confusion in those eyes. “I’m…not sure. I can’t remember what…” He cast a look back into his cave of a room as if it would provide the answer. “…happened.”

Finduilas closed her eyes.

“Is Thóriel alright?”

“I don’t know, Gwindor. She was frightened badly, and by someone she trusted. I cannot say how she will react when she wakes.”

A pause. “Finduilas…I didn’t mean…”

The anger broke away like the shattering of an iceberg in warm waters, but a ravine of helplessness replaced it. “Gwindor, I can’t. I just _can’t_ anymore.” She opened her eyes to his drawn face. “I don’t know how to help you.” She’d tried pushing, she’d tired letting him be, she’d tried stern words and gentle and coaxing ones, nothing made any difference. “It’s not that you have these episodes; it’s not even that you’ve terrified our daughter. It’s that you’re not even _trying_ anymore. You don’t care about living, or getting better. You’ve given up! I don’t know how I’m supposed to—” 

He stared at the floor. He wouldn’t even meet her eyes. His body was rigidly motionless. 

She didn’t want to hurt him, but why, why wasn’t he trying to heal? Why was he allowing himself to curl into a fist on the bed every day in the dark and stare at nothing as weeks, months, passed him by? And when he did rise, he had so much emptiness inside, only bitterness fencing the void, so little love, and no laughter at all. No smiles for his daughter, no hours spent doting on Thóriel; barely a touch, holding them all at arm’s length though they would have welcomed him into their embrace.

“I love you,” and though the words were spoken in despair, they still rolled off her tongue like honey, as they had every time she’d let them loose since she’d sewn up her back, snapping all the cracked vertebra into place. “I love you, but I cannot allow the person you’ve become around Thóriel any longer. Not alone. I won’t take her away from you. I wouldn’t do that. But…there has to be someone else there, just in case you…You see that, don’t you?” She didn’t want to hurt him, but she would. “Just until you get better. Just for a time.”

He stared sightlessly at the wall. He gave no response, not even a nod.

“Gwindor?” She reached out to touch him, though she knew he hated it. His frozenness scared her.

Her jerked away before their skin brushed.

“Gwindor—” The door shut in her face. Not slammed, that expression of _something_ would have been better than the hollow, subdued thud. 

*

On those days he emerged from his bedroom and went up, seeking the sun, there was no longer anything welcome about the open air. It bit his skin, its teeth savage and gnashing, and the sun was harsh and stinging. So he stayed in the dark (it was all he was suited for now). His Orc-eyes traced the crawl of a spider up the opposite wall, seeing the diamond-pattern on its back, and wondering with a weary sort of amusement if he could lure it close enough to finish off what he was too cowardly to. 

He’d refused his meals until his spine stuck out like a blade from his back. He’d embraced the starvation like an old lover.

He would have continued on like this until even Finduilas and Gildor’s begging him to eat could not make up for the meals he refused, and the death his soul longed for and yet was too stubborn to rip itself from his body for, finally found him. He should pick up his sword and finish this properly, he thought some days; but then the thought of crawling out of bed was enough to exhaust him, and when he did have the strength to finish this he hesitated, a kernel of hope still fluttering, fluttering, fluttering in his breast despite all reason.

Finduilas had finally ceased calling him from the other side of the door. He’d heard her take Thóriel and leave. It was a relief. He wanted to fling back the door, run after them, and beg her not to leave, not to take Thóriel away from him, not to take herself. But he couldn’t even lift his head from where it pressed into the mattress like a stone. His bones ground together in a skeleton that felt stretched, like skin pulled over sharp bones in an old woman’s face. 

He didn’t know how long he lay there in darkness before he heard a soft knock and Gildor’s voice. It took everything he had to lift himself up and cross the immense distance to the door. Gildor’s worried face peered back at him, and he was hit by the nauseating smell of food. He left the door ajar and dragged himself back to bed. 

Gildor took the invitation, carrying the unwanted food-tray in with him. “How are you feeling?” He sat down at the level of Gwindor’s curled hips. 

Gwindor turned his face away.

He heard Gildor’s soft sigh, and then, like the brush of butterfly wings, a touch on his hair, hesitant, awaiting his response. He wanted the hand to leave him be; he wanted to sink into its warmth like a starving animal. He tilted his head, just slightly, into the touch, and Gildor’s fingers pressed into his skull, rubbing the bones behind his ears, into the canal where his neck began. 

“Will you eat something today?”

It wasn’t a renewed will to live that had him reaching for the tray, it was Finduilas’ words filling all the black places in his head ( _It’s that you’re not even_ trying _anymore_ ). Gildor helped him sit up and guided his hand like a child’s to take a shaky sip of the watered-wine, and then a few slow-chewing bites of creamy soup, Gildor aiming the spoon for the chunks of meat.

When Gwindor had choked down all he could stomach, Gildor set the tray aside. His fingers went back to stroking Gwindor’s limp hair. Gwindor wanted to curl away; shamed by the very craving that had him turning into the touch. 

Gildor didn’t press him to speak, though he must have heard what happened this afternoon. He probably knew more than Gwindor. It had been a memory, a violent one. It wasn’t uncommon for him to blank whole hours when trapped in the past, but it had never happened with Thóriel there before. At least he didn’t think it had, and that was the worst: the doubt, the fear, what if he’d hurt her? 

“Has Thóriel woken yet?” He didn’t want to know. He had to know.

Gildor’s fingers never stilled in their smooth glide. “No.” After another moment of stroking: “Don’t worry so. She took a fright, but she is very young. The memory will fade quickly. All the more for the Mortal in her blood. They do not remember as we do.”

Gwindor didn’t flinch at the mention of Thóriel’s sire; it was obvious to those who spent time with the child. Orodreth must know, but he’d never spoken a word about it. Gwindor was grateful. He didn’t want Túrin to suffer a backlash when Túrin hadn’t been given the chance to make his own recompense as a man of honor. Gwindor willingly took the honor-debt in Túrin’s stead.

Thóriel may not remember being terrified of her papa in time, but given enough time she wouldn’t remember her papa at all. Finduilas would stick to her words, and was right to do so. He had proved himself untrustworthy and violent, not someone a child should be in the orbit of.

Gildor untangled his fingers and stretched out on the bed beside him, face-to-face. Gildor’s eyes were luminous in the sliver of light from the cracked door. The warmth of the limited lamplight caught in the few strands of pale gold in the mane of white. His face favored his father’s, and Gwindor could imagine it was Finrod looking at him with those long, generous eyes. But Gwindor did not imagine Finrod. Gildor was the person he wanted beside him. 

The road forked out before him, a choice. He could go on as he had until it eventually killed him and his spirit crept from its body, a dreary wraith of despair and defeat. Or he could take the other path, the one that required his bloody knees to take more hits as he struggled for his feet and inevitably fell, again and again, but maybe, just maybe, made it there.

He closed his eyes and struggled. Once upon a time, a thrall had crawled out of Angband and found hope in the eyes of a stranger. Once upon a time, Estel had laughed defiance in his chest and taken the hand of an Elf who’d come into the Darkness and picked him out of the mire, giving him a reason to breathe again. That was before he realized he could never run away from eighteen-years of degradation and misery. It was never going away. He couldn’t lose these memories like a broken horse shoe tossed aside on the road. They’d be right there in his head, whichever path he took, a part of him forever.

He opened his eyes to Gildor watching him. He thought he should learn to touch again, reach out and trace the planes of the excitable boy who’d grown into a gold-hearted man. But not yet. 

He wasn’t anymore sure how to mend a broken spirit than Finduilas, or any of the (useless) healers. But he knew the secret pressing like talons into his heart, hurting him worse than even the horrors of Angband. He had to speak it, seek punishment (forgiveness), anything to make the pain of breathing stop.

“Fingon put us on the Northern flank –all the soldiers Father commanded—we weren’t many. Orodreth had expressly forbidden our riding. But then, Finrod hadn’t wanted Mother and Father to fight at Tol Sirion either and that had never stopped them. Father was going to fight with his king and father, and we were going with him. I remember the tension, almost excitement, those finally days of marshaling. It was subdued of course; everything was done with secrecy so as not to alert Morgoth of our plans. Pointless in the end since He already knew. Always knew.” Gwindor broke off ( _The Lord sees all, knows all. You can never escape him, never._ ). He pushed on through the mud clogging his throat. “That last day dragged on. The Fëanorions were late. No one knew what was holding them up, and we were wound so tight –as soldiers are before a battle—the ends were starting to fray.”

Gildor cupped his hand as he faltered. He was thankful Gildor did not interrupt, he didn’t know if he’d be able to vomit this up if he did.

“They’d crossed the plain in the night –the Orcs—they had…they had captives with them, well, just one. They had…it was Gelmir. They’d—” Gildor’s fingernails tucked into his skin, breath rattling in his chest. “He was…his body, his face. Devastated. I might not have recogniz—but I did. Instantly. His hair was still black as a raven’s wing, and his eyes, they were his too. Though he’d lost…they’d blinded him. Mother and Father, they knew too, they knew it was him. And then the Orcs, they…they were taunting…they started too…started to cut, they chopped off—” Gildor pressed Gwindor’s head into his shoulder, and Gwindor didn’t realize he’d been crying until he felt the wetness of his cheeks as Gildor’s brushed them. 

He didn’t want to keep reliving this, but he had to. He _had_ to. “They chopped off his arms first, and then his legs. He screamed, oh Eru, he _screamed_. I had to get to him. He was my brother, and they were killing him! Nothing else matter, not the battle, or the fate of Middle-earth, only Gelmir’s head rolling in the…his eyes—”

“Shh, it’s over—”

“It will never be over! I let him die! I didn’t...I never _looked_ , I just _assumed_ , and he’d been there in that—the whole time! He’d needed me to save him and I didn’t, I didn’t! I as good as killed him myself!”

“Gwindor! Don’t—”

“That’s not all!” Gwindor broke from the embrace, hovering over Gildor’s worried face like a wolf waiting to pounce and tear out a deer’s neck. “I killed my mother and father too. Not to mention the _tens of thousands_ who died in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Don’t think I can’t hear what they say! They blame me, and they are right to do so! I charged in wrath, broke the ranks too soon, and wouldn’t stop until I’d smashed through the gates of Angband, fought my way up the stairs, to the very doors of the throne chamber! And cut us all off from aid, entrapped us, easy prey they cut down one-by-one until I was the last, and they dragged me before Morgoth’s feet. And he laughed. He _laughed_.” 

Gwindor’s chest heaved, his hand had latched onto Gildor’s bicep and squeezed. Gildor’s hand was on his side, thumb on his hipbone, just holding him there, not punishing, and not forcing an embrace Gwindor would have bucked against. 

“Gwindor,” Gildor’s voice was soft as the color blue, and Gwindor tasted the deep, steady places of a lake. “I want you to listen to me very closely. All right?” Gwindor grimaced, his body shivering, knotted muscles straining towards violence (against himself). “Gelmir’s death was not your fault. Your father’s death was not your fault. Your mother’s death was not your fault. The battle’s loss was not your fault. They were Morgoth’s.”

Gwindor laughed, his ribs leaking sickness. “A pretty out that. Let’s blame everything on Morgoth. How about we tack on a Kinslaying too, what about Finrod’s betrayal? Morgoth’s long arm?” His smile revealed nausea. “You forget, despite what the Valar wished us to believe, we have freewill, and Morgoth is not the sole cause of suffering in the world!”

Gildor’s fingers tightened on his hip, thumb bruising bone. The power of the grip steadied Gwindor. “You’re right, there is more evil in this world than Morgoth, but a brother’s love is not it. No!” He said when Gwindor opened his mouth to counter. “It was love! And it was more than Gwindor son of Guilin who charged the Enemy prematurely. You forget I knew Guilin and Bainar as well. If you had not led the charge, they would have. It was inevitable the moment Morgoth targeted your family –and do not think he didn’t! Gelmir was the High King’s grandson as well as your brother; Morgoth’s choice was not without cunning.”

“But if I had reached him sooner then—”

“Then nothing! The Orcs would have killed him before you reached him, you know this! They would have made sure of his death. They would not have allowed rescue. There is nothing, _nothing_ , you could have done. Are you listening to me, Gwindor?” Gildor shook him. “It wasn’t your fault!”

Gwindor collapsed back on the bed, hand covering his eyes, panting like he’d run up a mountain. Gildor pursued him, wrapping an arm over Gwindor’s emancipated chest, and tucking his chin against his collarbone. “It’s enough, now, enough. Let it go.” 

Gwindor swiped at the tears in his eyes, chest stuttering and mouth gasping as he clutched at air that wasn’t there.

“Gelmir is going to give you such a talking-to when we see him again,” Gildor said into Gwindor’s struggling breaths. Gwindor laughed though the sobs, fingers clenching in the white hair fanning his chest. 

“I want to go home.”

Gildor lifted his head, looking down on Gwindor’s face. His brow creased. “Home? But you are home.”

“No,” Gwindor swallowed. “To Andram. Where we grew up, Gelmir and I. Where Mother and Father—I want to go there. I want to go home.”

Gildor’s mouth parted. “I never even considered you might...It should have been obvious, you never spent much time in the city. I should have realized—”

Gwindor slipped a finger over Gildor’s lips. “Not your fault. I don’t think I could have…before. But I need to now.” 

“Of course,” Gildor smiled that smile of his that cradled a sunrise. “Would you like me to accompany you, or maybe Finduilas? I think it would be good, for both of you.”

There was this girl he’d once known. She used to fill him with windchimes. Her skin pressed to his used to stir and orchestra inside him. He wanted to start the anthem anew (not yet, but one day), but he would never hear the flutes in her voice again until he unstitched his blackened heart and let her touch the bloody muscle.

“Yes, if she desires it.”

“Silly,” Gildor tweaked his elbow. “Of course she does.”

*

The home of the province lord of Andram was a castle. Guilin had been born in Valinor, grown up on ice, and lived long enough in the North before deciding to raise his sons in the South to never forget why the Noldor had come here. His home reflected the War he’d never forgotten. That did not mean Faumbar was not beautiful, stunning really. 

Faumbar was the key Eastern fortress of Nargothrond. It rose like the luster of spiked pearls from the western bank of the Sirion, just before the river plunged into its roaring falls. Guilin had had a canal dug to siphon a measure of the mighty river around the backside of the castle, thus solidifying its foremost defense in a ring of swift-running water crossable only by a sole bridge of stone. Mist rose off the falling water, wreathing the castle in white cloud which had earned it its name: Home of the Clouds. Set against the white limestone of its walls and towers, it made for an impressive sight.

The gates were flung open to welcome their long lost lord home. Banners of Fingolfin’s house, blue and silver, were hoisted high, and a great cheering went up as Gwindor rode through the gates, loud enough to challenge Sirion’s roar. Finduilas swallowed hard. _This_ should have been the welcome Gwindor received from the moment he stepped into Nargothrond. 

Flowers and lush willow boughs were thrown down at the hooves of Gwindor’s horse. Children were hoisted to their papa’s shoulders to get a glimpse of the great lord. Someone started singing, and then the courtyard was filled with voices lifted up in rejoicing. Not a mourners’ lament, but a victory march.

Gwindor’s knuckles were ashen on the reigns, but his eyes, they were more alive than Finduilas had seen them in years. They were incandescent, glowing with the light of an Elven-soul that plowed right over their strangeness, refusing to let an insignificant thing like cat-pupils diminish their brilliance, their humanity. 

Gildor, riding on Gwindor’s other side, grinned so fiercely he looked positively demented. Finduilas wanted to kiss him; she wanted to kiss them all, every one of these loyal, stout-hearted people who had lit that light in Gwindor’s eyes.

When they reached the inner-courtyard’s steps, a squire ran forward to hold the bit of Gwindor’s horse as he dismounted (Gildor’s assistance so subtly given it was almost imperceptible). Walking to the crest of the steps Gwindor transformed into an echo of who he’d once been. Not a restoration, but the old Gwindor was there, in the corners. Trying. The one who made the grass lift with his laugh, the sunlight twinkle brighter, and the flower heads perk when he smiled upon them.

The sword at his hip, the glitter of the mail shirt, the richness of his sable cloak, the intricateness of his braids strung with rubies, and the Family Head and lordship rings on his fingers no longer appeared the mockery he’d named them when Gildor cajoled him into them for this occasion. Gwindor did not stand tall, but he did stand straight. He did not smile, but there was love in his eyes as he looked down upon his people, and they could feel it.

Silence fell, utter respect, when he opened his mouth to speak. “You have honored me.” A breath, only those close could hear its shakiness. “You have honored their memory, Prince Guilin and Lady Bainar, who you loved and served with the truest hearts and credit. And my brother’s—” She could hear the flap of the flags, the wisp of fabric against stones, the creak of leather, and the hushed voices of children saying they couldn’t see. “I thank you. I could not ask for better hearts to call my own. There are none to be found in all the lands of Arda!”

The cries of ‘Prince Gwindor!’ bounced off the castle walls, shaking the sky. Oh how they loved him! There was no pity in this acclaim, this embrace of shouts, only memory. The memory of two boys they’d watched grown into men of beautiful hearts. He would always be their Laughing Lord, no matter the form he returned to them in.

*

It was some hours before they found themselves alone in the private quarter of the lord’s family wing. Gwindor’s people had wanted to leave him in no doubt of their acceptance and love, even still, Finduilas was surprised the prolonged socializing had not taken a heavier toll on Gwindor. Yet he seemed still in durable spirit, enough to walk these hallways of ghosts again.

They’d left Gildor to play the socialite for them, and now Finduilas was alone to watch the way Gwindor’s fingers traced the carved sunrise in Gelmir’s bedroom door, not quite ready to open it. His parent’s room waited further up the corridor, and they’d left the family gathering room behind, Gwindor moving on with sudden purpose. All this had been leading up to this moment, this door, and what lay on its other side. 

Gwindor’s hand fell to the latch. His thumb ran over the stars scribed into the metal, before slowly lifting the latch and pushing it open.

The smell of books and parchment registered even before the light. The walls were lined with bookshelves where they weren’t plated with warm metals forged in squares of stories. The hearth was large, the wood edging it carved into more tales of Elven history. The windows were generous, perfect for an avid reader like Gelmir had been. 

Finduilas was reminded of the brother’s dissimilarities. The differences in temperament had fallen into the boxes of unimportant in light of Gelmir’s death and Gwindor’s breaking, but in life they had been palpable. When the brothers were together it was like the richness of spices that had been created to mingle in the most celebrated dishes and lie like perfection on your tongue.

Gwindor stood as one petrified in the middle of the room. His fingers curled into a ball against his palm. Finduilas did not dare touch him, though her fingertips itched to gather him up. 

Then he moved as one made of sawdust, a scarecrow granted animation. He went to the bed. Its hangings were pulled back, its deep red covers and embroidered pillows waiting patiently for a master who would never come home to its softness.

Gwindor sat himself down like an old man upon the coverlet. He shuddered, his whole frame vibrating, before he crumbled like dust into the bed, face pressed against the pillows, nose searching out a scent long dead. 

Finduilas covered the distance between them, slipped her arms around her husband, and was not rejected. She held him as he mourned, for a second time, the passing of a brother. It was a mourning she had no more understood he’d needed than Gildor. They hadn’t known. Anything. They’d just stumbled about in the dark for years while Gwindor withered away before them.

Finduilas kissed Gwindor’s hands clenched around the bedcovers like a warrior’s about a sword hilt. She brushed a hand down his side, and squeezed him tighter. He was home now. Hope waited for them on the other side of the grieving, patient as a doughty mare, ready to carry Gwindor out of the Darkness with the steady clip-clop of its hooves. Long though the rode stretched, they now had means to its end.


	80. Chapter 66

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Signifies modified quote from the Silmarillion

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 66

Year 495 of the First Age, Nargothrond (only weeks before its fall)

Thóriel’s skinny legs straddled the pony’s sides, and her face was a war between delight and fierce concentration as Gwindor instructed her on how to urge the pony on. It did not want to obey, content to snip at the tuffs of grass poking through the corral’s fence, but Thóriel would have her way.

Gwindor folded his arms as his daughter set her heels to the pony’s sides, and pulled with all the strength of her five-years upon the bridle. Finduilas was seated in the lawn behind him. Her dress flared out about her, and her fingers flipping through the most recent household ledgers. 

Finduilas’ duties had doubled as the number of Elves seeking the Havens of Sirion increased, but not a word of complaint passed her lips. She batted away his attempts to lighten the load from her shoulders, and beseeched him to go play with Thóriel as her own time with their daughter was exhausted by duties. She was the only queen Nargothrond had ever known, but though she’d had no mother to lead her through the hurtles of the Lady of Nargothrond, she had jumped through every hoop –even the burning ones during the Fëanorions’ occupation—and come out on the other side, perhaps not unsinged, but unbeaten. 

Finduilas’ gaze flickered up from her work at times to watch them, but she no more feared Thóriel’s falling than he, tender though Thóriel’s years were. If Thóriel had been a full-blooded Elf, she would still be tripping over words and toddling about on unsteady legs. But she was not, and already she’d begun learning her letters and engaging in the exuberate play of an Elf three times her age. 

It was because of these obvious signs of her blood that they came rarely to the city now, preferring the seclusion and welcoming embrace of Faumbar. But Finduilas had wanted Orodreth to witness Thóriel’s fifth Begetting Day, and they were delayed in returning home when rumors of not only large bands of Orcs, but Dragon sightings came down from the Northern border. Just days passed the news of Ivrin Province’s fall reached them, and all the rumors condensed into one disquieting truth: the greatest of the Fire-drakes, Glaurung, had been the one to defile the Pools of Ivrin. The reports were flooding in of a host of Orcs sweeping south.

Gwindor flexed his hand, testing its strength as he often did at the thought of what was coming. He’d put on weight these last two years, and regained some of his old strength of body. When the time came he would ride with the army in defense of his home. He had no fear of death. Despite the progress he’d made and the abundance of his good days, he would never fully heal. He longed ever for those gone before him, and suffered in the night in the grip of his past. But for his living family he feared much.

“Papa look!” Thóriel’s obstinacy had ruled the day, and the pony had been torn away from the dandelion heads to go ambling along the line of the fence (still sneaking mouthfuls of grass at its pleasure despite the little heels banging impatiently into its sides).

“Well done!” Gwindor nodded approvingly at his beaming daughter. As in all things she favored her Edain roots, and had not an Elf’s natural affinity with animals or nature. She was so like her birthfather; at times Gwindor’s throat constricted when he was caught in the innocent joy of her eyes. Had Túrin ever been this innocent?

He did not turn his head to seek out the tall figure standing in the shadow of the overhanging stable’s roof. He knew Túrin was there, watching, and had been for some time. Only a blind man would not know who Thóriel’s real father was, and Túrin, despite being consumed with his own pain and rage against the world, was not blind.

They came to Nargothrond but seldom now, yet whenever they did, and Túrin was not away on the borders leading the army, Gwindor spotted him watching Thóriel from the shadows. Túrin never spoke a word of it to Gwindor, and Gwindor thought Túrin might hope if he kept his distance Thóriel would escape the curse on his blood, or perhaps Túrin simply did not have the confidence to approach what was his and yet was not. 

Túrin was like that with his heart: bold to the point of recklessness in all else, his pride and self-assurance unmatched until the intimate matters were touched. Túrin ran deep; deep as the depths of the sea, but was just as unknowable and secreted. Gwindor doubted any but he had any idea how severely Túrin had been wounded in his past. Túrin was practiced at concealing the true gravity of his soul-wound and putting on a face as untouchable as the steel of his Dwarf-mask. 

Once, Gwindor would have crossed the distance of the corral and called Túrin over. He would have welcomed Túrin to his side, and into their daughter’s smiles. But Túrin had grown distant and hard, and now held himself aloof. The noose of his doom was tightening about his neck. All the softness of his nature was being strangled and replaced with tendons of stone, and all the secreted caverns stuffed into deeper holes, replaced by a face of strength and confidence denying that time was running out. 

Gwindor had not returned to the Council of Lords, but he spoke his mind to Orodreth, and his counsel clashed with Túrin’s. Once, Túrin’s anger at being challenge would have blown strong but swift. Now it simmered into resentment.

The damage of open-warfare had been done, and no counsel could take back the blade thrust aiming for their heart, but Gwindor pushed for the city’s evacuation of women and children. His counsel was scorned as not only overly dramatic, but dangerous, by most lords. The wilderness between Nargothrond and the Havens of Sirion was extensive and hazardous, with Orcs roaming the lands again. Despite the approaching Orc-host, Nargothrond was sure of itself. It had grown as prideful in its successes as Túrin had. 

But Orodreth was sensible enough to entertain the possibility of defeat, and had ordered heavily armed escorts for any who sought the Havens. Few male Noldor took that route, choosing to stand and fight as they ever did in their pride, but some sent their wives and children along with the caravans of Sindar heading south.

Finduilas came to stand beside him at the fence, leaning forward on the rails while he leaned back. They watched the pony’s slow plod. 

Finduilas had let her hair down from the customary gold-wire bun she favored when she slipped on the armor of the Lady of Nargothrond. The air teased its loose waves, blowing their abundance against his chest. Her elbows were propped up on the rail, and her fingers came over to trace the embroidered sleeves of his tunic absentmindedly.

“Mama, do you see?” Thóriel took her hands off the reigns to wave at Finduilas, and the pony seized the advantage of the child’s distraction to trot towards a clump of sweet-grass. 

Thóriel tottered dangerously, her arms pin-wheeling with the jolt of the pony’s sudden movement. Gwindor pushed off the fence in an instant, Finduilas’ cry in his ear, but Túrin got there first. That he’d moved quicker than Gwindor was not a surprise; he possessed the prowess of a man in his prime. Túrin caught Thóriel as she toppled from the saddle, and scooped her against his chest. Her hands balled in his tunic, shaken from the fright. 

Gwindor ran a lash of self-recrimination over the backs of his thighs. He should not have assumed Thóriel’s safety. “Is she alright?”

Túrin pulled the clutching hands out of the fabric of his tunic. “Of course.” He set Thóriel down on her feet.

Gwindor held out his hand for her, and Thóriel wrapped her fingers about his. “You have my thanks, my friend. I should not have let her ride alone.” 

Túrin’s mouth pulled down. “She’ll learn never to let go of the reigns again. It was a foolish thing to do.” He gave Thóriel a stern look.

Rather than shrink away from the harshness of that gaze, Thóriel straightened her spine. But Gwindor said, “She’s only a child, Túrin.”

Túrin didn’t flick him a glance; his eyes tightened their hold on Thóriel’s. “A fall from that height won’t hurt her seriously. She needs to learn how to handle a fall, so when she next falls, nothing will keep her down.”

Thóriel slipped her hand out of her papa’s, suddenly ashamed of needing the comfort, and lifted her chin at Túrin. “I’m not going to fall off the pony again! You’ll see.”

Túrin crossed his arms over his chest, raising a brow at the child. “Never make a promise you can’t keep. You _will_ fall again. It’s your job to prove you’re tougher. Tougher than anything.”

Thóriel scowled up at Túrin, looking so much like her father in that moment Gwindor was torn between amusement and sorrow. Túrin scowled right back. “You think you’re made of the tougher stuff of the Earth? Think you’ve got it in your blood? Then prove it.”

“Túrin, that’s enough.” Gwindor placed a hand on Thóriel’s thrust-up shoulder.

Túrin turned a flashing glare on him. “Certainly. I’m sure you know best now to raise _your_ daughter.”

Gwindor’s lips parted at the animosity in Túrin’s voice. Had he misjudged so badly? He’d thought Túrin’s distance from Thóriel was Túrin’s choice. “Not here,” his eyes slid down to Thóriel, “if you wish to speak to me of this, then we will, but not here.”

Túrin’s nostril’s flared. “And if I wanted her to come with me now. If I wanted to see _my_ —would you refuse me?”

Gwindor looked at the furious, hurt man before him for a long moment, long enough for the anger to seep back out of hectically bright cheeks and eyes. Túrin wrestled the anger bullying his gut away, but when he spoke the hurt still snapped at the words: “Would you, Gwindor?”

“No.” Gwindor took his hand off Thóriel’s shoulder. “If Thóriel would like to get to know you, then I will name myself glad. Thóriel,” Thóriel’s head cocked up to meet his gaze. “Would you like to spend some time with this man? He’s a friend of your mother and me. You might not remember but—”

“I remember!” Thóriel said, affronted. “He’s my Uncle Túrin. Grandpa showed him to me _ages_ ago.” She dropped her eyes at Gwindor’s chastising look. “Sorry Papa for talking mean to you.”

Gwindor almost made her apologize to Túrin for her earlier rudeness even if Túrin was deliberately provoking her, but decided against it. If Túrin wanted an apology, he could ask for one. Gwindor had complete confidence Túrin could reap one if he wished. “And would you like to go with your Uncle Túrin?”

Thóriel bit her lip, suddenly hesitant before the tall, formidable stranger. But then she straightened her shoulders. “I suppose.”

“Well then, it looks like you have your wish, Túrin.”

Gwindor was privilege to a flustered Túrin. He never believed he’d see the day, but Túrin was blushing and actually stammered with his reply. “Wha—now? What am I–?” 

Gwindor suppressed a smile. “If you’d rather wait—”

“No, it’s fine, perfectly acceptable, of course,” Túrin eyed Thóriel like she was a caged squirrel, ready to burst out in madness the moment the two of them were alone. “Well, come along then.” He beckoned Thóriel forward like one of his soldiers, expecting immediate obedience.

This was not a promising start. “Thóriel enjoys visiting the lambs. There are some newborns in the East Barn. Finduilas and I can meet you there in a bit.”

Túrin didn’t acknowledge the suggestion, his long legs eating up the ground. But Gwindor watched as he turned east for the barns after he’d cleared the stables, Thóriel running beside him.

“Was that wise?” Finduilas came to stand beside him.

Gwindor didn’t take his eyes off the retreating pair. “I’m not sure.”

“It’s not that he would ever set out to hurt Thóriel, but he can be…”

“Yes. And I’m afraid he has no experience with children if that demonstration was anything to go by.”

“We’d best not leave them alone together long. But Túrin would have taken it as distrust on your part if you’d refused him.”

Gwindor look to Finduilas, her eyes turning to meet his. Her fingers walked the distance to the back of his hand, brushing the skin. Gwindor did not flinch from the touch; he hadn’t for some time.

“Please.” Gwindor curled his thumb around her slender pointer-finger. “Please, go. For my sake, if nothing else.”

“I will not fly from the Enemy. Nargothrond will not fall.”

“You cannot know that. Nothing is sure. That host is coming for us. They will strike us here, and break us.”

Finduilas’ fingers imprinted themselves in his skin. “Do not give up hope. The reports say Glaurung leads the Orc-host yes, but Dragons have been slain before.”

Gwindor shook his head at her dogged convictions. “And they have also _not_ been slain, and wrecked death upon thousands! If the army should fall—”

“It won’t.”

Gwindor let out a frustrated sound, yanking away from her. But her hands leapt the distance between them, taking his wrists between her fingers. “You believe we will be safer away from Nargothrond, in the Havens, but what of the road between them? Many have left to brave it, but none can say which choice will be the safer. If the end comes, I would have it find me beside those I love. But I do not believe this is our end. Nargothrond’s caves run deep, and her army is mighty and courageous. We will outlast the Enemy!”

“You have too much faith in uncertainties. I want you to take Thóriel and go to the Havens—”

“Will you try to order me, husband? As my father wishes he ordered my mother away?”

Gwindor drew his wrists away, face tightening. “Why must you do this, Finduilas?”

“What? Have a will outside yours? Have hope?” 

“Is not Thóriel’s safety—”

“Do not! Do not use my daughter’s life against me! I have told you my reasons for thinking Nargothrond the safer choice. Now what of yours? If you truly think Nargothrond will fall, then why do _you_ not take Thóriel away?”

“You know I cannot abandon my duty!”

“So it’s acceptable for the Lady of Nargothrond to run away? What will that do to our people’s moral? What will that tell the soldiers sent out to die?”

He threw up his arms. “Don’t turn this into something it’s not! I want you and Thóriel safe. That is all.”

Her mouth pressed into a white line. “I am not leaving.”

Gwindor stared at her; she stared back. “You have no idea, no idea, what would happen if you were captu—” He couldn’t finish the word. The horror spread out from his gut like the bursting of a star, an inferno of unlight, rock clumps tumbling into the void of space, beauty exterminated.

Finduilas’ mouth softened. But her position was unmoved. “It is a risk I take whether I flee from here or stay. There are no paths to absolute safety.”

Gwindor looked away, unable to bear the image of her behind his irises –dress torn, hair crushed into the mud, blood smearing her thighs, and her eyes empty enough a world could crawl inside them and never rekindle their light. Just his fear, he told himself, not a vision of foresight. It could not be.

His words would not sway her; they would go unheeded as they ever were. He turned away. He would find Túrin and Thóriel and continue playing at normalcy for a few more days. 

Finduilas’ hand on his shoulder did not alter his course, but his steps did stop. “I would not part like this. Do not be angry with me. Not if it is as you fear and we have little time left.”

“I hold no anger, only dread for the future. For in my heart there is no hope of victory.” He did not curve his neck to her when she slipped her arms around his shoulders. Her supple body pressed against his back, her chin cupped into the nook of his collar.

“We have known joy together, have we not? Even if the measure was small.” Her breath caressed his jaw line. His stomach rebelled at the intimacy of the gesture, even as his palms wanted to fit themselves to the slope of her waist. He would not. They touched, but never like this; not since that one disaster. “Do you regret marrying me?”

“How could I?” His head turned with the strength of its longing to where her mouth hovered so close to his skin.

“Easily.” Her eyes met his as he sought her from their corners.

“Have you regretted binding yourself to this?” he asked, stopping his yearning flesh from inching closer to her heat, and gently removed himself from the circle of her arms. 

He placed himself firmly across from her. She watched him, sadness pressing into her mouth like a kiss. “Never. How could I?” She turned his question back at him, but instead of letting him answer she spoke again, “I married the best man to ever walk Arda. I have not known a moment’s regret. Not even in those dark years. Heartache, yes, for you, but not regret. One day we will lie together in bed, entwined as we were always meant to be, with love unbridled, innocent of restraint or shame or lies or concealment between us.”

Gwindor closed his eyes, wishing he could catch a glimpse of this vision in the darkness behind their lids. But it was hidden from him, far away, not of this life.

“Come,” she startled him out of his thirsty search. “Let us go discover what mischief Túrin has gotten our daughter into.”

Gwindor tucked the dream not for this life away, and followed Finduilas. They found Túrin and Thóriel sitting in the hay of the lambs’ stall. Thóriel was curled up around one of the fluffy lambs, skinny brown arms squeezing its middle while Túrin brandished one of his knives for her, re-enacting a truly horrific tale of how he’d gutted an Orc-captain with it, which was sure to give most children nightmares for weeks to come. 

Thóriel looked fascinated, though she clutched her lamb tightly to her chest on Túrin’s most enthusiastic jabs. Túrin offered the knife, handle first, to Thóriel, and Gwindor picked up his pace before his daughter could wrap eager fingers around the enticingly forbidden weapon handed to her like candy. 

Honestly, Túrin.

*

The army would march at sunrise in two days. The last of the bannermen were marshaling, coming in from the furthest southern provinces. Much of Nargothrond’s strength had already been concentrated in her capital, but these last few leg muscles would steady her. 

The reports put the Enemy’s host at 40,000, most of those Orcs, only a bare handful of wolf-riders. But they had Glaurung, and the destructive power of a Dragon could not be underestimated. Nargothrond would meet the host with an army of 30,000; most of Nargothrond was already predicting their victory. To look at the numbers, it seemed they stood a chance of winning, and Gwindor wondered if he’d not been falsely pessimistic as other Elves were quick to chastise him for, but still he feared defeat. Gwindor was careful not to announce his fatalistic fears before the soldiers. A captain was no kind of captain who fostered doubts in the heart of his men. 

Gwindor had only just returned from Faumbar with his own rallied forces of the Andram Province. Nargothrond was bursting at its seams, and could house no more bodies in its caves, so the companies from Andram camped outside the gates, nestled up against the Sindar-dominated ones from Arvernien, and the Noldor woodsmen of Taur-en-Farath armed with their heavy axes they logged the forest with.

He sought more helmets for his Third Tiers, who had largely been gathered from farms and craftsmen shops. They’d been handed swords and little else. He knew chain mail was too much to ask, but helmed and armored in boiled leather, padded coats, and a mix-match of metal plates was not too much to ask. 

He was heading for Gildor’s rooms. It was drawing into the late hours of the evening, but with only days before their riding out, none of the captains were abed yet. Gildor had no forces under his own command; he had enough to get on with as overseer of the supply distribution. It was not a station Gwindor envied him. He anticipated Gildor would not find sleep this night.

His brisk pace led him to Gildor’s private chambers. He’d searched for Gildor first in the workplace bustling with harried scribes, Guild Heads, and minor lords getting in the way as they haggled to have their needs met first. Having no luck there, he capitalized on his kinship and took himself to Gildor’s private rooms.

He found a guard at the door. One of Finrod’s former Sworn-companions who Gwindor knew from another lifetime, when Gelmir and him used to drink more wine than was advisable, laugh until their bellies ached, and gamble away too much of their gold in the joy of their reunions. Thangaer, this one was called. 

Gwindor nodded at Thangaer, eyes raking down the insolent lines of the man’s body, clad in something…Gwindor was not quite sure what it was supposed to be; only that it was very bright and there were an awful lot of gems sewn into the top. But there was also a sword buckled to Thangaer’s waist, and a palm resting casually upon its pummel. 

“Prince Gildor is not to be disturbed.”

Gwindor raised a brow, “Even by a friend and kinsman?”

Thangaer showed his teeth. “Do you come as friend or lord? Lord I think, with business. Prince Gildor has important matters already occupying his mind.”

“Thangaer,” Gwindor dropped into familiarity. “I need to speak with him. Stop being an ass, and let me through.” 

Gwindor surprised himself by slipping into a manner of speech he’d lost along with his lightheartedness. He had the sudden impulse to tilt his nose up and look down at Thangaer in that lord-mocking way they used to adopt when in their cups together. His neck was twitching to swivel around and seek out a pair of dark eyes to wink at and a slighter pair of shoulders to throw an arm around. But Gelmir wasn’t there to share the teasing with, so all the desire to indulge in it turned to ash in his mouth. 

Thangaer smirked, stepping aside with a flourish of his hand as if ushering Gwindor towards a throne, “As my lord wishes.”

Gwindor felt the less for not being able to give a witty retort back, but his throat was coated with gravel. He pushed the door open without knocking, expecting to find Gildor laboring at his desk with an array of burning candles about him and a fire going to ember because Gildor hadn’t bothered to get up and add more logs. He had not expected to see the Nauglamir around Gildor’s throat. It netted all the light, glimmering warm and bright as Elven-eyes, and cast dancing points of brilliance on the walls and Gildor’s skin.

Gildor’s long eyes were cast down, the shadow of full eyelashes fanning against Gildor’s high cheekbones. His creamy hair was unbound, awarding a feyness to the picture. He was a perfect mingling of Finrod’s breath-stealing loveliness and his mother’s lithe wildness. Gwindor imagined, if his desires flowed in that direction, his body would be stirring from Gildor’s irresistible allure, lips hungry to taste the honeyed sweetness those lips promised. He found the picture Gildor made pleasing, and could have gazed upon such beauty for hours, but was not aroused.

The door clicked shut behind him, and Gildor looked up, startled. “Gwindor!” 

Gildor’s fingers had been tracing the shapes of jewels in the Nauglamir, but now leapt away. His face colored. Gildor was not easily embarrassed by his own actions, but Gwindor supposed anyone would flush to be caught wearing their dead father’s jewelry. 

Gildor’s hands flew to the clasp at the back of his neck, tongue tripping: “It reminds me of him. I like thinking about—it feels like he’s close…” He slipped the magnificent necklace off, hands fumbling for the casket.

Gwindor walked closer. “Understandable. He loved that necklace. He used to wear it everywhere when the Dwarves first gifted it to him. It would comfort him to know you’ve treasure it so, in the purity of memory, not greed. For Finrod loved it not only for its beauty, but for what it represented –his friendship with the Dwarves, and the pride of his workmanship in the shaping of Nargothrond.” 

Gwindor’s words worked a fond smile out of Gildor. Gildor returned the necklace to the velvet bed of its casket with fingers reverent with memory. “I remember. Though he did not wear it as often in later years, after the Dagor Bragollach.” Gildor closed the lid, and sat back down to his work, picking up his quill. “What brings you? This cannot be a simple call of pleasure.”

Gwindor sighed, taking up occupation in a chair across from Gildor. “No. I’ve come about more helmets for my men. I’d like another three-hundred, at the least.”

Gildor rubbed his fingers over his mouth. “I wish I could grant you that many, but the storehouses are emptying of our stockpiled armor rapidly. I can give you…” He shuffled through a stack of parchments. “Let me see,” his fingers trailed down lines of cataloged supplies, “fifty.”

“Fifty!”

“Yes. Do you know how many of our army is Third Tier, newly recruited and ill-equipped? 10,000! Our stores simply cannot outfit such a number. I have the smiths’ concentrating on arrowheads and swords; at the least no man will find themselves without a proper weapon.”

“This bodes ill.”

Gildor shot him a look, leaving off his perusal of the lists, and in a gesture of absentmindedness, tucking the quill behind his ear. “Do not jump to gloomy conclusions too quickly! Orodreth has been stocking the caves for weeks now. We are well able to withstand a siege for months. Our cavalry is shaping up well; we have some 600 more mounts than were anticipated. I could wish the Fëanorion smiths back among us, but we have 20,000 troops not only well-equipped for battle, but experienced as well.” 

Gildor’s mouth was bright; his eyes clear as blue glass. His hope rode high in his breast. Gwindor could almost believe in victory looking at that animated face. Almost. 

Gwindor felt pressed to speak his dark premonitions, but was hesitant to blight the light in Gildor’s eyes. The desire to speak was shattered as ink started dripping down Gildor’s cheek. The dear boy didn’t even notice, so intent was he on shaking some hope into Gwindor. 

The ink wrote black lines into Gildor’s skin, and when it slithered down his jaw, towards his chin, he finally noticed. His fingers flew up, coming away black for his eyes’ inspection. He cursed, throwing the quill from its perch and rubbing at his cheek, which did nothing to remove the stain, only spread and mute it. 

Gwindor was struggling not to smile when Gildor’s gaze met his across the spread of the desk. Gildor dissolved into laughter. Gwindor smiled at the sight of Gildor’s cheeks budding up, his teeth flashing, and his arms pressing into his sides. Gwindor hoped Gildor never lost the ability to laugh at his own ridiculousness.

Gwindor retrieved a napkin from an abandoned supper tray and rounded the desk. Gildor calmed his giggles, and took the offered cloth with another chuckle, “Much good this will do me! I need a washing basin for this mess!”

“Most likely,” Gwindor smirked, and leaned against the desk as Gildor tried vainly to wipe his cheek clean.

Gildor threw the cloth away in defeat, but was still grinning. Very little could put him in an ill-humor. Gwindor’s gut felt like a cord was wrapping tight about it. The hour of battle marched ever closer, and nothing would ever be the same after.

“Stop.” Gildor looked up at him. “I know you’re thinking bad thoughts. It’s all over your face.”

Gwindor looked away. “I can’t help it. I have such a feeling of dread. I do not believe we will win this battle.”

Gildor was silent, and Gwindor turned back to him at the unexpected pause. He’d assumed Gildor would jump to Nargothrond’s defense as all others did. Finally Gildor said, “Maybe we won’t; though I still hope and believe in victory, but nothing is sure. Yet even if Nargothrond falls, I think we made the right choice in choosing open-warfare.”

Gwindor frowned, “How can you say that if it means the destruction of our home, the death or enslavement of thousands?”

“Because I would rather we fall in glory, whole and reaching for everything we once were, than have remained the sulking cowards who turned away all who begged aid; hunting Orc, Man, Elf, Dwarf, killing in fear, and buying our lives with the blood-payment of others. What we were before Túrin’s coming…it was despicable. Túrin brought the honor and dignity back to Nargothrond. Even if we fall on account of his counsel, I will never regret his coming.” Gildor’s smile was fierce and glorious as a lion’s.

*

The reports had been grossly inaccurate. The plain of Tumhalad was forested in rows upon rows of black-armored Orcs, their eyes burning with a zealous fire for their Lord, their coarse hair pulled back in braided tails whipping anticipation. 

It must be a host of at least 70,000, with the great serpentine body of Glaurung striding on his squat legs before them. The Dragon should have looked ludicrous. It did not. The sheer mass of the beast was terrifying. The sun was glinting off its hide of scales, and the rows of fangs flashed sharp as serpent’s teeth in its grinning mouth.

They would die here. But they would die fighting. A hard end, but Gildor hoped not a bitter one.

Gildor felt the tremor go through the ranks as each row crested the hill and looked down upon their death. Nerves were fraying with fear, but quickly, with the skillful hands of veterans, the captains grasped needle and thread to sewn them back up again.

Orodreth rode at the pinnacle of the army’s head, mounted upon a white horse, his hair braided back but curls already escaping their bonds. He worn a high helm with twining serpents upon the cheek flaps, and on the breast of his shinning mail was the House of Finarfin’s sunburst heraldry. Orodreth controlled his horse with perfect calm as he rode along the front ranks. His face was cool with poised confidence, not a sliver of doubt to be seen. 

Gildor admired Orodreth’s composure in the face of certain defeat. He’d never seen his cousin in battle before, but he’d heard the stories. Whatever Orodreth failings as a ruler, he was a born general, if for no other reason than his passage through the lines lifted the hearts of his soldiers and sparked hope back into their eyes.

Túrin rode the line further down, and likewise displayed no disquiet at the underestimation of their Enemy’s might. His bearing did not radiate coolheaded serenity, but ferocity. He was a black fire jumping into the hearts of the soldiers, stirring their blood for battle, thirsty to clash with Darkness and wrest victory for its black-taloned grasp.

Gildor spotted Gwindor’s forces peaking the neighboring knoll, and urged his horse forward. He had no command, no duty but to fight, so felt no compulsion to keep his place in the company of the king’s lords. He rode off towards Gwindor like one of the messengers and banner holders flying to and fro at the nose of the army.

As he drew near, the vision of Gwindor seated upon his proud warhorse grew sharp. Gwindor stood high in the stirrups to call an order down the line, and Gildor’s heart sang, despite the direness of their situation. For there, invincible and commanding as the days of old, was Gwindor as he remembered him ridding off to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. Despite his diminished form and mutilation, Gwindor appeared to him the shining lord who’d once stirred hope in men’s heart by the mere passing of his presence. Gildor remembered how heads used to turn in the corridor to catch another glimpse of the dazzlingly lord with the booming laugh that reached into your soul and turned all your organs into a garden. 

Gwindor was not laughing now; there was no smile on his mouth, but as Gildor rode up, he felt the thriving courage of Gwindor’s troops, and their confidence in their lord. Gwindor may not rival the sun, but his soldiers gleaned comfort from their lord’s wisdom, revealed now to all like the stripping bare of flesh as the forces of Morgoth’s army rolled out before them like a hideous carpet. 

Gwindor swiveled in the saddle as Gildor pulled up. Gildor mustered up a grin, flashing it bright enough to catch the attention of all those around them. “That Glaurung walks a bit like a duck, don’t you think? Waddles, really. I wonder how he moves so fast.”

Some of the soldiers let out startled snorts of laughter. The sounds caught in the web of their nervousness, but it was laughter all the same. Gildor smiled brighter, winking at the men who’d laughed and now looked fearfully at Glaurung’s hulking form, as if the Dragon could detect their amusement and would make sure they paid for it personally.

Gwindor was wearing a too-grim face, so Gildor waggled his eyebrows at him. They were going to die today, no need to ruin their last good moments of life. The battle was going to be hell enough as it was. 

The solemnity slipped off Gwindor’s face like cascading water, and he huffed a laugh. “You’re unbelievable, you know that?”

“What, come on, don’t tell me you don’t think he walks funny too! He looks more like a fish sprouted legs than a fire-breathing monster!” Glaurung was terrifying, and every bit the bone-melting monster tales had painted him. 

Gwindor slid him a knowing look. Gildor’s swagger only hid so much from those who knew him well. Gwindor kneed his horse into a spirited cantor down the lines, and Gildor followed, with a banner holder coming behind. 

Gwindor lifted his head to the sun peaking the eastern horizon. The sky was folding into pleats of color, reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows. “And so the sun rises, and the music ascends in a swell of beauty, for what is more glorious than this?” Gwindor’s pupils were slender slits in glowing irises as he gazed at the blooming field of color. 

Gildor looked upon the uptilted face and was amazed. It was no forced daring seeding Gwindor’s words; it was the purest Estel Gildor had ever beheld. Gwindor had fought through thralldom, crawled through the Darkness of hounding memories, and somehow, against all odds and reason, found his feet. 

*

Gwindor thought his innards were being yanked up in great violent handfuls. He did not have long for this life. “Túrin…set me down. It is…over.”

Túrin laid him on the grass with all the care he’d once held Gwindor in an Elven-cell. His face was void of the softness it had known then. The Dwarf-mask was pulled aside, but the bones in Túrin’s face were as uninviting as the steel. He did not speak as Gwindor struggled for breath, each one wet; his lungs punctured and flooding with blood. 

“Túrin...” Gwindor reached out blinding, his eyesight failing him as the world darkened. He could not find Túrin’s hand. The sun had fallen over in the sky, and he was growing so cold. 

He felt a creeping hand close over the gashes in his side. Suddenly fingers were pressing with power into him, tearing at cloth to blot up the spilling blood. “You...can’t…my body is marred…beyond healing.”

“Shut up.” Hissed from the darkness, the fingers biting, punishing him for his words.

Gwindor’s licked his lips with a bloody tongue, starving for a sip of water. Oh Túrin! Irresistible as honey in a hive you are; the bees swarm to you, cling and die on your skin. The host that had slaughtered the army of Nargothrond would move now against her cave-city, and all his nightmares would become reality for Finduilas and Thóriel. “I love you Túrin, but I rue the day I took you from the Orcs. But for your stubborn pride Nargothrond would yet stand awhile. If you love me…any at all anymore…then leave me! Return to Nargothrond and save Finduilas and Thóriel!”*

The fingers fled from him. He heard the sound of a mail-shirt shifting, and saw Túrin’s lofty silhouette rising above him. He opened his mouth as Túrin spun away, the Man’s face hard as granite, not sparing Gwindor a word. But his voice choked on the blood in his lungs, and all Gwindor could do was call in silence for the Man running from him to return, return, return. 

His tongue had bristled with hornets, and he would take the cruel words back. Túrin, with his deep cavern of a soul, would already be blaming himself viciously for the ruin wrought upon Nargothrond. Gwindor should have reached out to lift the boulders off those shoulders, not piled more on. But Túrin was gone, and Gwindor was alone in blackness. Those would be his last words in life, and they were badly done, badly done indeed.

*

Gildor woke with his head splitting open and the light of a campfire burning his eyes. He felt like he’d been dragged up from the molten core of the Earth. He groaned, trying to wretch his head away from the light, but all that did was shoot a jagged jolt of agony down his side and split his head in two again. He cried out.

A cool hand was on his brow, a voice hushing him. “Lie still, little prince, try not to move this banged-up head of yours.”

Gildor’s eyelashes fluttered, trying to crack open mere slivers. It didn’t sound like an Orc’s voice, but one could never trust when it came to the Enemy. A hand cupped the corner of his eye, shading them from the worst of the light, and he was able to get a look at the face leaning over him. It was Thangaer. 

Gildor let out a shuddering breath, and squeezed his eyes shut again. “’m dyin?” 

Thangaer laughed. “No, you’ll live. You just need a bit of patching up.”

“Hap?”

“You’re about as articulate as a goldfish, so give it up.” The coolness was returned to his brow, but this time it was a cloth and he smelt the crispness of athelas. “I assume you want to know the details of the battle? Well, we lost. Rather spectacularly.” Thangaer’s voice was strange now, tight as frozen rope. 

Another voice came from the dark. It wobbled with misery. “Nargothrond is a Dragon horde! All dead! The king—”

“Quiet Baragod!” Yet another unknown voice. How many Elves were there? “You should not trouble the prince with this grievous news while he is so injured!”

“Wh—”

“Hush Gildor, you are safe, and for those who are no longer there is nothing we can do for them.” That was Thangaer again, his fingers pulling aside the bandages on Gildor’s side. “This wound is healing well. And now you have woken, I do not fear for your life. Would we had a healer among us, but we are all of us soldiers.” A sigh. “Rest now. We shall not reach the Havens for days. No doubt you’ll sleep through all the excitement.” A cup was pressed to his lips. He smelt some herb, but obediently drank. He passed into sleep within moments.

*

Her skin reeked of fire and death. The place between her thighs was a ruin. They took turns with her and the other captives every night, and she didn’t think the bleeding would ever stop. Some of the captives had already faded. Their souls had ripped from their bodies with a screech echoing the cry in Finduilas’ defiled places. But she did not loosen her tenacious hold on life. 

Gwindor was dead; he must be, for he’d not returned to her. Her father and Gildor as well. Túrin had come charging back to the city, and a trickle of other routed soldiers, but not her Gwindor. 

A trembling body cocooned itself in her side. Her hands were bound above her head; her legs sprawled before her on the dirt, dress long shredded, and her back pinned against the unmerciful bark of a tree. Her heart cried out in her chest to wipe the tear tracks from Thóriel’s cheeks. 

Thóriel was too young to understand the horror the Orcs dealt upon her mother every night they halted the grueling march North, but old enough to share the terror of the other captives as she squeezed her hands into her ears and huddled into a whimpering ball when the Orcs came for her mother. Though Thóriel’s small body had been left untouched from this horror, the Orcs delighted in tormenting all of them, even the children, with their whips, clawing hands, and sick promises.

Finduilas’ head rolled, her neck feeling boneless as a doll’s. “Mama’s here.” Her voice cracked on the wasteland in her throat.

Thóriel shoved her head deeper into Finduilas’ dress, one arm squeezing tight around Finduilas’ waist, the other wrapped around her own belly. Thóriel did not beg to go home or ask for her papa; she’d learned that first night she’d receive either. There was blood on the back of Thóriel’s dress, fresh slashes plum-dark. They must have ‘played’ with her while Finduilas was suffocating through the night’s rape.

“Hush my darling  
the twilight’s calling,  
lay your head in the   
wool of my breast  
and fear no evil howling”

Finduilas closed her eyes with the last note of the lullaby, praying Thóriel would find the escape of dreamlessness. But the meager peace Finduilas hoped to glean from oblivion was stolen as a clamor rose across the camp. She thought at first it was Orcs’ brawling, not an uncommon disruption in the night, but the bellows quickly turned into howls and barked orders. 

“Quick, Thóriel! Hide under my skirts! Hush now, hush.” The clash of steel and twang of bowstrings drew closer, but so too did the Orcs working through the bound captives, headless of their cries, to plunge spears and knives into their flesh, vindictive to the end.

Thóriel scrambled to obey her, hiding in the billow of Finduilas’ once full skirts. Finduilas met the eyes of her approaching executioner as the Orc lifted its spear. Let Thóriel live, let Thóriel live, let her little girl live. Everyone was dead, she was a ruin, hope extinguished in her breast for glorious stands against the Dark. But don’t let them take her Thóriel away as well.

When the Man stooped over her, calloused fingers pressing into her throat for a pulse, Finduilas’ eyes flickered open, though her breath was rattle in her chest. She’d never felt pain like this before, not even when the Orcs climbed atop of her, one after the other.

The Man’s face reminded her of a tree: his jaw branches, eyes meeting hers brown and hard as bark, but harboring the warmth of life beneath. She struggled out a few gasped words, feeling Thóriel’s knees pressing into her side (don’t let her be dead, please, please, please): “Tell the Mormegil that Finduilas and Thóriel are here.”* She meant to speak more, and call Thóriel from hiding, but the hinges of her voice rusted, and she could get no more words out through the blood in her mouth.

Her head fell back, the weight too much for her neck. But then, just before the darkness took her, she heard Thóriel’s beloved voice calling ‘Mama?’ Little fingers pressed into her paling cheek as the Man exclaimed in surprise at the revealed child. Finduilas died, knowing her last wish, at the least, was granted: Thóriel would live.


	81. Harvest of Blood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note:   
> • This is post-Nirnaeth Arnoediad (Battle of Unnumbered Tears), which means Fingon is dead.   
> • mangacrack’s “A Spark to Ignite” has a unique and intriguing take on Maglor’s voice and its power; it defiantly influenced my writing of his voice here. A fantastic story and a stunning author, go check it out :D

Intermission: Harvest of Blood

Maedhros tapped a finger against his mouth. The cartographers had sketched a map of the area around Menegroth and it lay spread before him now. The Fëanorions’ had not been granted the ‘privilege’ of entering the forest-kingdom of Doriath before they marched on her, and thus their intelligence had been limited. 

Now the Fëanorion army filled Doriath’s belly and dug into all her secret holes. The logging had already begun. Maedhros wanted the trees around Menegroth’s entrance cleared, and had ordered foraging parties to the outlining Sindar settlements. Winter’s velvet neck stretched long; they would need to live off the land, which largely meant the stores its inhabitants had left behind as they fled into Menegroth.

“How long before the engineers complete the dam?” Maglor leaned toward him, eyes scanning the map. 

“Too long.” Caranthir clenched the missive he’d been reading in his fist and threw it. “Cursed incompetence!”

Maedhros looked up sharply. “What has happened?” 

“I want _two_ companies guarding the Khazâd-Road not one! There could be an ambush on the supply lines. We cannot know if all the cowards have hidden themselves in Menegroth.”

“Who would dare counter your order?” Curufin’s eyes glinted like light sliding off a naked blade.

“I did!” Caranthir pulled a fresh sheet of parchment across the table and started writing. “I thought one company was all we could spare, but it should have been two!”

Maglor pinched the bridge of his nose. Maedhros knew the feeling.

Caranthir wrote aggressively, “I cannot trust others to do things right, so I must see to everything myself.”

Amras let out a gusty sigh; his hand had not left Amrod’s arm since the twins entered the tent. Amrod spoke even less now than he had as a child. Maedhros didn’t think Amrod had spoken more than orders to his captains since the sons of Fëanor agreed to march on Doriath.

Maedhros looked away from Amras’ fingers in Amrod’s sleeve. Amras kept touching Amrod as if Amrod would slip away and never come back if he let go. Maedhros didn’t want to look at Curufin’s sneer aimed at Caranthir, or Celegorm pacing, pacing, pacing through the tent, never still, his loose hair trailing like a comet’s shinning tail. So he settled on Maglor at his side. Maglor was safe. His eyes were the closest to the way he remembered them in Aman.

Maglor’s hair was caught back in a fist. He wore full armor and his sword on his hip. The pulled-back hair extenuated the high line of his cheekbones, sharp as the sweep of hawk’s wings. He’d lost weight. They all had.

“Maedhros,” Amras leaned forward, “I don’t like it. Do you want us to be the monsters in every child’s bed-time story?”

Amras wasn’t referring to their war on Doriath; they’d all agreed, there would be no more debate over the coming Elf-slaying (not Kinslaying, these Sindar weren’t their kin). Amras was speaking of the riders Maedhros had sent out to hunt Orcs and bring back their carcasses. Amras’ face had sickened at the prospect of mutilating even Orcs and hanging them from the trees like rotten fruit. 

The resolution grounded in the crowns of Maedhros’ teeth. “I would cut every Orc in Angband apart –slowly—if it saved even one of my soldiers’ lives.” Maglor’s hand snuck under the table and lay on Maedhros’ thigh. 

Amras was not dissuaded. “Such deeds, can you not see how closely they bring us to the very evil we fight?”

Maedhros laughed. It was the only kind of laugh he had left after Angband: the ugly kind. “Then it is one deed closer to that end.”

Maglor’s fingers dug into his flesh. A voice cut into the pulling tension, one that shocked every son of Fëanor but the speaker. Curufin said: “I agree with Maedhros.”

Even Caranthir paused in his brutal corrections of himself. 

Celegorm’s restless legs stalled. “You agree…with Maedhros?”

Maedhros was sure there were a few of his decisions Curufin had agreed with over the years, but Curufin never admitted as much. Curufin had not openly sided with Maedhros in anything since Maedhros had ‘betrayed Father’ when he gave away the golden crown of the High King. 

The shipwreck in Maedhros’ throat hurt. 

“Yes, I agree.” Curufin smiled. It was a smile that could slice through ribcages. It was the smile of a man one step over the line of madness. “Let the cowardly Sindar cringe in their hole and dream about the terror of Fëanor’s sons. Let their blood turn to milk and their arms to water. Let them run away, if they can. Every Sinda so terrified he’s shaming himself is one less to draw bow against us.”

Curufin’s mouth curled. But his eyes, they were cavernous. Something had been broken in Curufin after Nargothrond, a last thread grasping sanity snapped. Now he was unpredictable, and the more dangerous for it. Curufin held his love, but Maedhros didn’t trust him. 

The madness was not apparent to those who did not know Curufin intimately, but to those who did… The guilt was a raw thing in Maedhros’ chest. He was the Head of the Family, he was supposed to take care of his brothers, but he could not bring himself to rise in the darkness and go to Curufin when he heard him crying out in the night. Tent walls were so very thin. He did not want to know the sins Curufin’s sleeping mouth recited, the failures, the aching holes in his heart he called for: Curufinwë, Father, Finrod. 

Maedhros’ bones weren’t whole enough to knit himself back together with, much less another.

“Of course you do.” Caranthir’s mouth twisted. “That kind of depravity would appeal to a lunatic.” 

Celegorm sprang to Curufin’s defense. “You would know! We have all seen how much you enjoy killing things.”

Caranthir leaned back in his chair, watching Celegorm place himself at Curufin’s side as he ever did in family disputes. While the rest of the brothers tread carefully around Curufin, Caranthir offered no such sanction. He made no allowances for insanity. But then, Curufin’s tongue had lost none of its sting, and he wasn’t hesitant in wielding it against a brother either. 

“Are you suggesting we sacrifice our own people over concern for our enemies’ delicate minds?” Curufin’s smile was like walking on a knife’s edge. Perilous. Unstable. He’d retained a full-measure of cruelty, and his cool, analytical mind still ticked behind those eyes, but all his logic was skewed. He couldn’t see how far he’d fallen.

Maglor spoke before snide comments could escalate into violence. “Enough. Maedhros has made his decision and we will abide by it.” 

Maglor may not agree with him, but Maedhros was the Head of their family and the high-general of the Fëanorion forces. Maglor would bow to his authority. Maglor seldom bothered to step between his brothers, but when he did his words carried the weight of gold. 

Maglor’s voice was power. It was a sea-breeze blow across flushed faces; it was the hand of their father on their shoulders, holding his rowdy boys back from youthful fistfights. 

Maglor’s voice was the seductive allure of harmony, sinking down into hot minds and soothing them. The brothers knew the feel of Maglor’s magic, but allowed their moods to be tamed for their own personal reasons: Curufin because he’d heard the echo of Father in Maglor’s voice, Caranthir because they had more important things to worry about than the grooves of well-worn arguments, and Celegorm because quick as his temper flashed, it settled the easiest of the three.

Maedhros eventually called an end to the council, and his brothers trickled out of the tent. The twins first, together as always, too pieces of a whole, their horses standing ready for their masters. Caranthir next, alone as ever, with no lingering words for his brothers. Celegorm hovered at the tent flap, waiting for Curufin to join him, but Curufin waved him on. Maglor stayed rooted at Maedhros’ side until Maedhros spoke to him with the sweep of an eye, and then he too left. Curufin and Maedhros were alone.

Curufin stared at his profile, but Maedhros did not look up. He took his time rolling up the map. It was an awkward task with only one hand, but he had learned long ago how to cope. He couldn’t calculate Curufin’s next move. Once he could have, but that was before Curufin’s actions became erratic and his mood swings so volatile they smashed right through sense as he started threatening kings with war.

He felt Curufin’s gaze leave his face. Strange, Maedhros’ cheek felt cold. “Did you know we have something in common?”

 _We have several things in common_ , Maedhros thought, _though you’ve made a practice of ignoring all of them._

“Ruthlessness.”

Ah, yes, that was one of them.

“If Turgon or Galadriel, or even _Fingon’s_ son, stood before you now and you had to choose between cutting out their heart and grief befalling one of Fëanor’s blood, you’d cut.” Curufin’s voice was triumphant, reveling in how far ‘Perfect Maedhros’ had fallen –or perhaps risen, since everything was messed up in Curufin’s head.

( _Fingon, forgive me._ ) Maedhros did not deny it. There was nothing he would not do for his family, for the faces he’d embroidered on the insides of his eyelids in Angband. Nothing.

“I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Maedhros finished securing the map and looked up. Curufin studied the eight-point star ring on his finger; the one Father had made for Curufin on his Coming of Age. Curufin never took it off. Not even to bathe. Father had made it though, so the mithril band shone as alluring as the day of its birth, and the obsidian gem in its star-bed was more beautiful than the pockets between stars.

“Had what in me?”

“This,” Curufin spread his hands. Doriath. A second Elf-slaying. 

Maedhros didn’t bother replying. Curufin wanted to hear something like: ‘I loved Father just as much as you.’ Of course he’d loved his father, but this wasn’t about Fëanor. It was about the Oath. The scorpion in their minds feasting upon them. 

He wasn’t a fool. He knew there would be no forgiveness for the Fëanorions after this, no succor to be found among Elf-kind. They would become The Dispossessed in full. But they could run to the ends of Arda and still not escape the hands squeezing their windpipes, the scorpion stinger tearing chunks out of their minds, savaging them until they gave up, gave in. They’d been Doomed the moment the words of the Oath passed their lips and they called down an inescapable and pitiless Power upon them.

“What happens after Doriath?” he asked because he needed to be punished. He needed to hear the fullness of Curufin’s madness. He had led them into the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. He had _organized_ it. His schemes had spun twenty-thousand deaths, he’d—

His temples ached. He stopped the train of thought. It was better not to think about the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. There was a hole of blackness in his head when his mind wandered too close. He got such terrible headaches. 

“After?” Curufin turned to him. His eyes burned like Father’s had at the end. Madness. “After we’ll have Father back. Father will know what to do,” Curufin nodded along to his thoughts. “He’ll know how to defeat Morgoth. And then,” Curufin smiled. It was the smile of a child, bursting with delight. “Curufinwë will come home. Maybe we’ll go back to Valinor; Father will know how to handle the Valar. Or maybe we’ll stay here, go South, somewhere far away, and build a new home. Father will decide.”

Maedhros nodded. Curufin watched him. Sand poured through Maedhros’ arteries. “That sounds...right.” 

He fingered a sheaf of parchment. He should write Fingon. He’d been meaning to for such a long time, but he’d never quite gotten around to it. 

Curufin moved closer. Then, with just the tips of his fingers, he touched Maedhros’ shoulder. Curufin hadn’t touched him in centuries. “Father will understand about the kingship. He’ll get it back of course. Turgon is so concerned with hiding in his bolt-hole the rest of the Noldor will be properly thankful to have their rightful king returned to them.”

“Fingon. Not Turgon. Fingon is High King.” Memories clicked against the walls of his mind, small and sharp like spiders. His head hurt.

Curufin paused. Then, “Yes, Fingon.” Curufin dropped the touch and turned to leave. At the tent flap he looked back at Maedhros who’d pressed his fingers against his temple. He had such a terrible headache. “Everything will be alright soon. You’ll see.” 

Maedhros wasn’t sure if he said anything in return, but Curufin left. He touched the blank parchment again. He should write Fingon. Fingon wouldn’t approve of Doriath, but Maedhros needed to explain his reasoning’s. 

He wondered if Fingon would come to him after they got the Silmaril back, like Fingon used to come to Himring. Fingon never visited him in Amon Ereb. Maedhros hadn’t seen him since the battle, and even then it was across a black field of Orcs and Balrogs and Dragon-fire and he couldn’t get through, couldn’t get to—

His head hurt. 

He should write Fingon, there was so much left unsaid. It would be inadvisable for Fingon, as High King, to associate with the Fëanorions after Doriath, even if he wanted to. Maedhros should send a letter now, before Fingon burned his words before he read them. 

He wished he could smith words like Maglor, but while he certainly had more finesse with a pen then Celegorm, he had small practice unveiling his heart. When Maglor had confronted him over his relationship with Fingon, Maglor had stunned him by approving ( _Anything that gives you joy, Brother _). Maglor described it in that lyrical way of his: To you, he is the laughter of the gods, beauty immeasurable.__

__Maedhros would have written Fingon these exact words if he didn’t known Fingon would see through them and know their true crafter. He could only write the thoughts already in his head: I love you. And when I say that, I mean that if every other voice on the Earth stopped, I wouldn’t notice for a hundred years because I’d be listening to yours._ _

__His hand dropped from the parchment. He should write Fingon. But not today, maybe tomorrow. He had such a terrible headache._ _

__*_ _

__Amon Ereb rose like a fist from the plain. Her gates thick, her lone bridge across her gorge uninviting, her walls forested with soldiers. The air smelt of ghosts. Maedhros’ banners, Maglor and the twins’ too, with Fëanor’s sharp star blazing in their heart, snapped like wolf jaws, defiant and proud._ _

__Celebrimbor shouldn’t be here. He should return to the Havens, ride back now before he entered the gates and crossed a line he’d sworn never to cross again. But the moment he’d unwrapped the package and read Maedhros’ letter he’d known he would come._ _

__There had only been one thing lying upon the oilskin. His father’s ring. The one Curufin never took off. The one Grandfather had made for him in Valinor. Celebrimbor had know, even before shaking hands tore Maedhros’ seal, what it meant._ _

__He read the words, wishing they were knifes he could dig into his skin and rip out all the disloyalty, the pride, the pathetic fears that had kept him from seeking out his father after Nargothrond. He’d regretted, of course he’d regretted. He’d replayed that day over and over and over again, running it through his mind like a whip. He told himself he’d done the right thing, but his heart, his heart…_ _

__Celebrimbor had touched the ring’s mithril band and felt a pulse, just a flicker, but oh! A smith with enough skill left an echo of themselves in every creation. Curufin had left a sliver of himself in the last ring he’d ever made. Fëanor had put a spark of his fire into the ring he’d given Curufin that now lay in the crease of Celebrimbor’s palm._ _

__Celebrimbor’s hand rose to touch the rings against his chest. His horse snorted, tossing its head in impatience at its master’s delay. Celebrimbor crossed the line, and rode into his uncles’ fortress. He was going to see what was left of his family, maybe just this one last time, maybe he’d never leave, but he had to see their faces. He’d never get to see his father’s again. He’d never get to say goodbye to Curufin or Celegorm or Caranthir._ _

__He inhaled sparrow air; he couldn’t breathe. His grief pressed like a rock vest against his ribs, constricting. His fingers trembled on the metal of three rings. They hung on a chain about his neck. His first, with its ruined band of gold and silver, Curufin’s fire-opal, and Fëanor’s black-star. Three rings pressed against his heart._ _


	82. Chapter 67

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 67

Year 498 of the First Age, Forest of Brethil

The floorboard creaked under her socked foot, and Thóriel froze. The murmur of voices did not break off, so she resumed her creeping. Uncle Turambar would be angry if he found her spying, and Aunt Níniel would have no pity if Thóriel heard something hurtful. “Natural consequences,” Auntie would say. 

The fear of disappointing her aunt and uncle was almost enough to send her scampering back to bed, but she’d heard a scrap of the conversation and it held her name. Uncle Turambar and Aunt Níniel often spoke of her when she wasn’t in the room, but the way Auntie had said her name, like she’d just been dunked in an ice-bath, had Thóriel straining her ears for more.

Her feet padded soft as mole paws over the last floorboards, not heading the chill pressing against her soles and scattering goose-bumps over her bare legs. She wished she’d slipped the otter-fur cloak Auntie had made for her over the thin nightshirt. She’d had a night terror: a memory of things Uncle told her not to think about. 

Thóriel reached the door and cupped her ear to the crack omitting the voices and the warm glow of a lit fireplace. 

“…not an Elf child, or not wholly one.” Thóriel imagined her face pressed into Auntie Níniel’s waist, and rubbing her cheek along the fabric of Auntie’s tunic whenever she heard Auntie Níniel’s voice. It was soft, never rising in anger, but not gentle. There was a roughness to it, like the wool of a tunic against skin.

“I know.” Uncle’s voice came in answer, deep and strong as the roots of mountain. Just hearing it made Thóriel feel safer.

“You know who her father is, don’t you? We need to find him. His daughter—”

“There is no need.” There was something strange about Uncle’s voice, and Auntie must have heard it too, for the only sound was the shifting of burning logs in the fireplace.

When Auntie finally spoke, it was almost too quiet for Thóriel to catch. “Then you mean… does the Halad know?”

“It’s none of Brandir’s business who her father is.” Turambar’s voice was quick and decisive, leaving no room for doubts.

Auntie Níniel was not most people though, and she did not sway like a willow in the wind to Uncle’s commanding voice. “Brandir has been good to us. He gave me a home and a future when I had none. He is family, as are all the Haladin. They should be aware of Thóriel’s heritage should anything befall us. These are dangerous times, Turambar, we cannot predict our fate. Death finds the Edain quickly, and will not wait for last words.”

Uncle was long in answering, and Thóriel pressed her face tighter into the door’s gap. The conversation was twisting things in her belly, and she was struggling to keep her feet still on the boards. None of this was making any sense. 

She remembered her father. There was no danger of her forgetting, even if sometimes, when her nose stung from the memory of smoke, and she closed her eyes and heard the screams and wailing and dark laughter, she would clamp her hands over her ears and wish, just for a moment, that she couldn’t remember Nargothrond or the Orcs, even if that meant forgetting Mama and Papa.

Uncle spoke and sent Thóriel spinning out into space, unmoored, all the roots cradling her safe and sound in the knowledge of her place in the world snapped. “Thóriel is my daughter. It is for me to decide her future. I don’t want her tied to my name, my doom, and that’s my final word on the matter, Níniel.”

The floorboard gave a screech and Thóriel’s elbow knocked against the door. She cried out, clutching the pinched nerves, but the damage was done ever before her voice gave her away. 

“Come here, Thóriel,” Uncle called her, voice stern.

With hanging head, Thóriel pushed the door open the rest of the way and slipped into the room. The silence stretched, and she dared to peak up at their faces through the over-hang of her bangs. 

Auntie was sitting in the chair opposite Uncle’s in front of the fire. Her fingers never stilled in their clever working of the furs spread over her lap, even though her eyes would lift to catch Thóriel in their gaze every few stitches. The silver of the fox-fur glinted like metal in the firelight, just as bright as the beaten silver earrings in Auntie Níniel’s lobes that swung like the hulls of ships on a sea. 

A familiar feeling of pride and anticipation stretched Thóriel’s belly. One day her own ears would bear the twin crescents of the moon, and maybe a day was coming when Mother Moon would bless Auntie with a child, and from Auntie’s crescents would swing her first white Moon Bead for the first child she’d born.

Auntie’s gaze lifted from her work again. When their eyes met, Thóriel received the sliver of a smile, though there was something in it that made her ribs too tight about her lungs. Thóriel glanced away quickly; her gaze dragged reluctantly, but irresistibly, over to Uncle. She found his face different than what she’d feared. It was serious, as always, but not bent with anger. 

When Uncle had her attention, he held out a hand, beckoning her forward. Thóriel picked up her feet, refusing to drag them like a coward. She still expected to be tossed over his knee and given a good swatting for being out of bed and eavesdropping on her elder’s private conversations. When he clasped her fingers in his large, hot hand, and pulled her between his knees, right up close to his face, her stubborn courage failed her. This was not how it was supposed to go, and the unexpected was more frightening than a known punishment.

He’d called her is daughter. But her papa’s name was Gwindor. She loved her uncle Turambar and her auntie Níniel, there was not one night when she didn’t fall asleep with the secret wish that she was their daughter in truth, but she’d never wanted that wishes’ fulfillment if it meant she lost her papa and mama.

“Thóriel,” Uncle’s hand came up to cup her face. His fingers were rough with callous and touched her like a piece of lace, but they were foreign upon her skin. Her uncle was not free with his affections, even if she knew he loved her, in his own way. “You heard some things you should not have. The pain they will bring you, both now and in the future, will be your punishment.” His words settled like frozen water in her limbs.

“Are they…am I…” Her tongue tangled. But no, she would not quall from this. She stumbled before nothing. She would prove she’d been forged from the tougher skin of the Earth. She’d make her uncle (father) proud. “I am your daughter? Is my mama really my mama?”

Uncle’s fingers curved about her ears, combing through the thick, black curls. “Yes. To both. Princess Finduilas was your mother, and I am your father.”

She could not stumble now. “Then why didn’t I live with you in Nargothrond? Why did my papa—Gwindor—”

“Call him your papa. For he loved you, and gave his life to keep you safe.” Thóriel’s lips trembled against her will. Uncle traced her jaw before releasing her. “You are very young, but this world does not wait on age, do you understand, Thóriel? You must be strong, stronger than anything or anyone. Only then will you survive, only then will your fists be mighty enough to wrestle with fate.”

Thóriel saw Auntie Níniel shift in her chair from the corner of her eye. Auntie placed the silver-fur hat she’d been making aside and rose. She crossed the distance between the two chairs in one easy stride. Her aunt was tall, as tall as a man of the Haladin. Her head was held proud and graceful as a queen’s; her thick yellow hair swept back from her face into braids. The firelight made Auntie Níniel’s skin glow warm as lion-skin. 

There were no others among the Haladin with the yellow hair of the Hadorians, but there were some of mixed-blood like Thóriel. Auntie Níniel had told Thóriel of how she’d come to live among the Haladin, with no memory of another life in her mind. Only her hands remembered old patterns of a life before, and her heart whispered of loved ones forgotten. 

More than one among the Haladin had told Auntie her blood must have a root in their people, but more of her was rooted in the Hadorians of Dor-lómin; the elders would sit around on their benches in the sun reminding each other of who among their people had married outside their forest and couldn’t have given Auntie and Thóriel their Haladin blood. Once, only once, Thóriel overheard Uncle telling Auntie his father was like her, the blood of Haladin and Hadorian, but he took after his mother who was of the Bëorians. But Uncle said no more, and had gone off to hunt Orcs on the borders after that, not coming home for weeks. Her aunt never asked for stories of Uncle’s life before Bethel, and Thóriel had learned from her example. 

Auntie Níniel had no stories of her own, so Thóriel made them up in her head, for all three of them. She’d weave tales of adventures and narrow escapes where they always came through every danger even if only by the skin of their teeth. They’d defeat legions of Orcs, battle Balrogs (never Dragons), and no one ever, ever fell behind. She kept her imagined histories in a secret, shameful place in her heart, for she’d erased her papa and mama and all the horrors in the past with them.

Auntie Níniel settled a hand on Uncle’s shoulder. “Thóriel is strong, Turambar, let her forge her own path. It may be she does not yearn for glory and battle.”

Uncle’s jaw set hard and unyielding. “She is of Húrin’s line. There will be no choice in the end. Better she learns to wring what joy she can out of life ere Death finds her, rather than waste her live in the shadows.”

Auntie Níniel’s fingers brushed up the strong line of Uncle’s shoulders to nestle in his hair. They rested there a moment, fingering the dark curls. Her eyes joined with Uncle’s before she drew her hand away. “Let us not talk of these things tonight. Thóriel has just discovered she has a living father; will you spend your first moments as father and daughter speaking of death?”

Uncle shook out his hair where her fingers had tucked it behind his ear, the jerk of his head restless as a stabled stallion. “Speak of it. Don’t speak of it. It matters little in the end. But I did not think to find you shying from truth, Níniel.”

“I do not. But one can know the certainty of Death’s Hunt, without dwelling upon it, my love.” She bent to press a kiss to his brow. “Come, shall we not be merry for one night at least?”

Uncle reached up to slide his fingers through Níniel’s hair, curling about the base of her neck. “Since it is you who asks it of me, I shall try.”

Auntie Níniel unfolded a smile for him, and dropped her knees to the floor. She knelt beside him, rested her cheek on his thigh, and took up his hand to settle it on her hair again. He granted her wordless request, and began massaging her scalp. 

Auntie drew Thóriel into her arms, resting her dark head in her lap. “Come husband, tell us a tale.”

“Hmm,” Uncle’s nails scratched light pattern against Auntie’s scull. “What sort of tale do my ladies request?”

Auntie Níniel nudged Thóriel’s shoulder. Thóriel answered, “Tell us of Beren of Bëor’s House, and his quest for the Silmaril.”

Uncle’s fingers did not pause in their work as he began to weave the story of one of the Edain’s most famous heroes, for this was no new telling. It was not strange to Thóriel to rest against her auntie’s breast and hear history recounted in uncle’s voice. Uncle had so many fresh tales to tell that he was often called upon at gatherings to regal the Haladin gathered in the Obel Halad with one, even though the Stool of Remembrance was never taken up by any other man.

When Uncle’s voice trailed off with the last line, Auntie shifted like a sleeper awaken from a dream, and lifted Thóriel from her resting place. “To bed with you.”

Thóriel rose reluctantly, but obediently. Auntie Níniel kissed her cheeks in that solemn way of hers, as if every night could be their last, and then Thóriel found herself pulled before Uncle again. Her uncle’s grey eyes were hard to look directly into, but Thóriel would not let her courage fail her. Her stomach fluttered shamefully, so she squared her shoulders and asked: “Shall I call you father now?”

Uncle smiled. It wasn’t a smile like other men wore. It was a blade, fierce and bright and dangerous if you got on the wrong side of it. But it was rarely unsheathed; Thóriel felt a leap of pride in her chest that _she_ had put it there. “If you wish. Though I would not be so quick to pick up my name if I were you. It is a heavy thing. Heavy and doomed.”

Thóriel’s brow pinched. “But I already have it, don’t I?”

Uncle’s smile vanished under a grim cloud, the one that always hovered close. “I fear it is so. Still, I would have you free still for a time. So call me not father, and leave the name of your birth behind, for names have power, Eagle-daughter, and I fear you will fly too high and be snared in a net of grief and betrayals. Walk upon the ground a while longer, until you are more ready to face the price of our blood. Neithan, I will call you. A name I once wore, and now suits you. For wronged you have been, and wronged more you shall be.”

Auntie Níniel frowned, and rebuked Uncle for speaking so to Thóriel, but Thóriel was strangely comforted by her father’s words. In some shadowed way they spoke to her of his love. He would keep her safe, even if that safety took the price of her innocence. She was more than happy to shed childhood to walk beside Túrin Turambar, and call him father (if only in her heart).

*

Year 499 of the First Age

The curved knife scrapped a long strip of flesh off the hide, and Aunt Níniel flicked it off the knife’s end with a movement fit to slice an Orc’s neck. Her mouth was a compressed line as she knelt before the beaver skin and continued fleshing it with aggression. Thóriel continued her own task with quiet movements, careful not to upset her aunt.

Aunt Níniel had been like this since the Folkmoot dispersed with the decision to go to war made. Thóriel had seen her aunt and Turambar speak to the people before the doors of the Obel Halad. Aunt Níniel had stood at Turambar’s shoulder, her eyes glittering, teeth white and bright in the torchlight. Her voice had risen in harmony with Turambar’s for war. 

Turambar had plunged into the forest directly after the Folkmoot, disappearing on some errand, but that was nothing unusual. It would be some days before the Haladin were mustered to fight, for Brandir had argued caution at the Folkmoot. While his voice had been outvoted in the matter of war, his soft words held the Haladin back from tumbling into war without a contingency plan, and preparations were being made should the battle turn ill.

Thóriel did not understand her aunt’s mood. Had Turambar and she not achieved what they set out to? They won the day and rallied the people to war. Why then was Aunt cutting into one of her valued hides with enough force to slash?

Thóriel drew the skin she’d been washing out of the washtub and carried it over to the drying rack. She watched Aunt Níniel scrap another dangerously fierce line down the beaver pelt. “Aunt,” Thóriel finished hanging the hide and crouched next to Aunt Níniel. “What troubles you?” 

Aunt Níniel sliced her a glare for the interruption, but Thóriel held her ground. She was no coward to shrink from a mere look. Aunt Níniel let out an explosion of breath, and sat back on her heels, shoving hair off her sweaty temple. “Did you stretch the hide well?”

“Yes, Aunt.” Aunt Níniel rose to check Thóriel’s work. The twines strung through the holes along the hide’s edge were taut as Thóriel’s arms could pull them, but Aunt Níniel’s strength stretched the hide several more inches. Thóriel helped her aunt secure the twine to the rack as her aunt’s fingers whitened with the strain of drawing the hide rigid.

When the hide was stretched to Aunt Níniel’s standards, she knelt beside the pelt she was fleshing again, and Thóriel went back to the task of washing the scraps of dirt off the next skin. Thóriel did not press her aunt for an answer. If Aunt Níniel intended to speak her mind she would do so when she was good and ready.

Thóriel was running the soap over the hide, elbows deep in the washtub, before her aunt spoke. “It is two different things, Neithan, knowing what is best for your people is fighting the Darkness, and sending one you love out into danger. Turambar is a mighty man, but even the mightiest may fall.”

Aunt Níniel finished a scrape, and flicked the pulled fat from the knife’s edge. Her other hand came up to cup her abdomen as it had taken to doing since her stomach began to swell with the child it housed. Thóriel remembered the feel of her own hand pressed there, against her aunt’s belly, to witness the baby’s powerful kicks. A few more months and she would have a brother (her aunt had announced the gender with all the slyness of a mother who ‘just knew.’), and Aunt Níniel’ Moon Earrings would bear their first Moon Stone.

They worked under the sun that had long since bronzed Thóriel’s skin dark enough her own mixed heritage was no longer apparent. It reached its zenith and they broke for the noonday meal, making the trek to the Obel Halad to share it with friends. They did not find Brandir there to join them as the Haladin’s chieftain so often did; the preparations for the upcoming battle kept him away. 

Aunt Níniel took a place beside the brothers Manthor and Hunthor, Brandir’s kinsmen. Hardang and his henchmen Sargoth were seated across the table from the brothers, and the outspoken Dorlas was only a few seats down. Aunt Níniel had chosen duty over a relaxed meal with friends. Tensions would be high at that table, and words –some naked blades Thóriel could understand, others sheathed in so many layers she could not unpick their meaning—would be passed around.

Aunt Níniel’s chin was set proud and unyielding as she nodded back to the men’s greetings. Methel, Manthor and Hunthor’s, mother threaded her aging hand through Aunt Níniel’s arm as she called Thóriel forward. “Why don’t you sit with the other youngster, dear-heart. I am afraid you’ll be terribly bored over here.” Methel’s eyes winkled up into slits as she smiled at Thóriel. Methel had the best smile; it consumed her face, and scrunched up her eyes so tight Thóriel wondered if she could see through it. When Methel smiled at you, it was impossible not to smile back.

“Yes, Mother,” Thóriel bobbed her head at Methel, and wove around the tables until she found one mostly occupied with other children.

She wrinkled her nose when she spotted Avranc holding court at one end. He was 5 years her elder, almost a man, and had become unbearable since his elder cousin Hardang had taken him in after Avranc’s parents’ deaths. He’d started following Hardang around like a faithful hound. It was: ‘Hardang says this, Hardang thinks that, that’s not the way Hardang does it.’ All said with his nose stuck up as he adopted airs that had no place among the Haladin. Brandir never drawled down at them, and he was the Halad. Avranc was only connected to the House of Haleth through his mother’s marriage; he had no business walking with such a strut.

Thóriel plopped herself down next to Hunthor’s daughter. Brin was only 7, but she was better company than the kinds of toadies Avranc was collecting.

“Hello, Neithan,” Brin greeted Thóriel in her wispy voice that reminded Thóriel of pastries melting to the top of her mouth. 

“Brin,” Thóriel nodded as she reached for the serving ladle and scooped herself some stew. “Has your father been busy?”

Brin finished chewing her bite of stew before answering, “Yes, Father and Uncle Manthor have been helping Cousin Brandir. They said…” Brain bit her lip, her fingers picking at the hem of her tunic.

“What?” Thóriel shoveled a spoonful of stew into her mouth, her attention flickering from Brin’s nervous face to the theatrical show Avranc was putting on further down the table. Avranc kept looked at her, but glared and cast his eyes hastily away whenever he caught her looking back. She scowled at the back of his head.

“Uncle Manthor says Turambar…well he says it’s unwise to go so openly to war against the Enemy. Better we fight only to protect our homes…” Brin’s voice trailed off to a whisper by the end.

Thóriel frowned at the girl. “Better to die reaching for glory, to know you have done some good in this world, cleaned it of a bit of filth, then live a long, meaningless life in the shadows.”

Brin’s hands wrung in her lap. “My uncle says Turambar should not have spoken against Cousin Brandir as he did at the Folkmoot. He says Turambar is not a Haladin. He says Turambar acts like he yet lives among the Hadorians, and that Turambar still thinks like them. Other people say it to.” Brin finished, as if this last was some defense of her uncle’s words.

Thóriel’s nostrils flared, and she shoved her bowl violently from her. “Your uncle’s a louse!” She shot up from the bench and marched out of the hall. It wasn’t until the sunlight blasted her that her anger loosed its hold around her throat.

It wasn’t the first time she’d heard such words. She knew, though Turambar had lived among the Haladin as long as Aunt Níniel and her, he was never one of them. But Turambar did so much for the Haladin! He spent most of his time away from his wife and Thóriel to patrol the Haladin’s forest borders; the least they could do was show some gratitude!

Thóriel let her back hit the trunk of a tree, going unnoticed in the general bustle of the First Circle. Brandir had told her once that the Hadorians’ loved war and glory and dying for honor. They were a mighty people, noble and fierce, but terrible to have as your enemy. Those were her father’s kin, his people, chained in the North, slaves to the Easterlings.

The Haladin did not love war or ever seek it out. They would march on the Orcs with sadness in their hearts, though strength in their arms. The Haladin were not like the Hadorians. They were not a people who delighted in contests of strength, testing the strongest among them, or laying Crowns of Victory over their champion’s heads. When they fought and died in war, it was not for glory or honor. It was for protection of what they loved.

Turambar would never be a Haladin. Vengeance and battle-lust burned too fiercely in his chest. To sit idly by, living a simple life in relative safety, was something Turambar would never be able to do. She was proud of that, proud of him. She was Túrin Turambar’s daughter, and she would not trade her place in the world for Brin’s, with her living family and innocence. 

*

Thóriel heard Turambar come home. She would have flown out of her room to greet him, but the moment she heard the sound of the front door shutting and the clomp of his heavy boots, she also heard Aunt Níniel’s voice. It wasn’t raised in anger –it never was—but it was fanged and bared like a serpent’s mouth. Thóriel kept to her room and listening to Turambar snap back, brushing aside his wife’s concerns and questions. He answered to no one. 

There were times when Thóriel wondered if Turambar really loved Aunt Níniel. He cared for her, and Thóriel would think he loved Aunt Níniel, but then the shallower veils were pulled aside and she saw how much of himself Turambar kept back. He hoarded pieces of himself away from both of them; nursed them in secrecy like a foolish young soldier unwilling to reveal to his commander an injury.

The fight ended with the front door banging behind Aunt Níniel. Thóriel knew it was Aunt Níniel who removed herself from the poisonous house, Turambar never retreated. He would sit himself down in his usual chair at the meal table, pull out a knife to sharpen or arrows to fletch, and ignore Aunt Níniel’s glaring until she either left him be or walked away. Thóriel wondered how much Turambar cared about keeping Aunt Níniel happy, or sleeping under a peaceful roof.

Thóriel heard the thump of Turambar’s boots coming down the narrow hall towards the sleeping rooms. She slipped off her bed and padded to the door, easing it open. She stood in the door frame’s shadow, the lit candle by her bedside doing little to illuminate the hall, and waited for her father to either pass her by with a nod or pause to greet her. 

She’d never flung herself into her father’s arms. Not once. Monster hugs, being lifted off her toes and swung about, her face blanketed with kisses, those things she told herself she’d outgrown. Those were things she’d known in Nargothrond, with her papa and mama, not here in this harder life that would either shave away all the softness until only the tougher stuff remained, or leave her behind with the vulnerable and unworthy. Strength, courage, those were the currencies that matter here, and only those who possessed such would survive.

She scorned the little leap her heart gave when her father slowed to greet her. It wasn’t like she _needed_ his acknowledgment. He stepped within the rectangle of light bleeding from her open door, and she got her first look at his face. It was stern and unsmiling as ever, but though the scarce light dipped shadows into his eyes, they were not callous. 

He carried a black-yew bow in his hands. Her eyes lingered on it; her father never hunted Orcs with a bow. He wielded a mighty black blade with which he’s severed a thousand Orcs’ necks. He was the only man among the Haladin who fought with a sword, most favored the axe, with a few bowmen. The Haladin knew the axe well; they wielded it every day of their lives when they went out to collect wood for their fires. The bow too they learned as well as the fishing rod and snare, for it fed them. A sword was a weapon forged with but one purpose: to kill. 

Her father came to a stop before her, and she tilted her head back to hold his gaze. He looked down into her face, his hair slipping from his shoulders to mask the sides of his face. His hair reached almost to his mid-back now, as the other Haladin men’s did. It was as dark as theirs, but only attaining gentle curls where theirs favored a riot.

His tunic was as short as ever, ending at mid-thigh rather than his calves as was custom for the men and women of the Haladin. The wool was a muted grey without a single story stitched into it, not one square of history. It was as if he were a blank slate, coming from nowhere, born of nowhere, and going nowhere. 

Even if he’d dawned a colorful tunic woven with history, slipped a Sun Necklace around his throat, and picked up an axe, he still would never a Haladin. Thóriel did not care. He was her father; he was Túrin Turambar. He could be whoever he wanted, born from the Sun and Moon themselves, destined for an afterlife between the stars’ brilliance, it wouldn’t have matter to her. She would follow him anywhere, and be anything he asked her to be.

“Neithan, I have something for you.” He touched her shoulder and steered her out of the doorway, fully back into the candle’s light.

“What is it?” She did not bounce on her tip-toes as she’d seen other children do for presents. This must be a solemn occurrence. Her father rarely gifted her things, and never anything frivolous. 

Turambar lifted the yew bow, taking it with bow hands to hand over, like a warrior gifted a mighty weapon. “This is no child’s rabbit-hunting bow, but one in the make of the marchwardens of Doriath.” 

Her fingers didn’t dare take it from his hands. For her? It was an imposing thing. Stood straight, it would almost eclipse her height, and her arm, trained only to draw the bow she’d twisted from willow boughs, would fail under such a pull.

“You are right to doubt yourself, and wise not to take any weapon handed to you.” Her father nodded his approval of her hesitation, and dropped the bow from the Gifting Position back to his side. “A bow similar to this one was wielded by the greatest archer who ever walked or will walk Arda. Do not take up such a weapon until you have proven you deserve it. You have to earn the right to draw this bow. But I want you to keep it safe. Look at it every day, run your hands over the wood, learn it until you know it like your own hand so that when the time comes to wield it, it will be like picking up an old friend.”

Her father picked up her hand and wrapped it about the bow’s grip. “Put it somewhere safe.”

When he released the bow into her charge, taking his supporting hands from the wood, a grunt was yanked from her lips at the sudden weight, but she did not fumble her hold and drop what had been entrusted to her care. She drew the bow closer to her body, and ran her thumbs over the etchings in the wood, marveling at the detailed carvings of twining vines, blooming flowers, and coiling Elven script.

She couldn’t read the Elvish words any more than she could read the tongues of men. “What does it say?” Her finger traced over the letters as if she could learn their mysterious if she touched them long enough.

The frown was in her father’s voice, and she looked up to see it on his brow. “Didn’t Gwindor teach you to read?”

She thought of cavern ceilings erupting in diamonds, set with jewels like the night sky was congealed with stars. She thought of the downy coat of a lamb against her cheek, the feel of a pony between her legs, and her papa’s arms around her, holding her. She thought of afternoons tucked beside her mama on the bed, Mama’s fingers teasing her hair into silly braids and walking over her belly and into her armpits to send her squealing with laughter. She thought of halls packed with soldiers, their over-loud laughter to starve off the nerves, the bustle they’d caused coming and the greater one they’d stirred marching out. She thought of the silence of waiting after, and then she thought of the roar. That roar was the first warning they’d had (far too late to save anyone) before the diamond-pressed ceilings began to shake.

“Thóriel?” Turambar’s grip on her shoulder focused her eyes.

She dropped her gaze back down to the bow, ashamed. When was she going to stop shaking every time she thought of _that_? She swallowed and fingered the Elven script again. “I recognize some of the letters, but I can’t remember how to put their sounds together.”

She saw the disquiet on her father’s face, and her stomach twisted. She’d never cared before that she couldn’t read, few of the Haladin bothered learning the skill. Her father wanted her to know, believed she’d had this seemingly unimportant skill, but she couldn’t give him what he desired.

Her father squeezed her shoulder before releasing her. Maybe he wasn’t disappointed in her. “I’ll ask your aunt to teach you when I return. Níniel remembers how to read and write, though not where she learned.” 

“You won’t teach me?” The question slipped out with an unacceptable note of longing. She knew better then to press her father for what he did not offer freely. 

Turambar’s eyes slip away. “Perhaps.” 

*

Turambar led the Haladin home after routing the Orcs and sending them scampering back to their master. But there were no victory celebrations; it was not the Haladin’s way to celebrate even a triumphant return. The burial mounds were built for the husbands and sons and fathers who had fallen. They were returned to the stone of the Earth under the watchful eyes of the Moon and Sun who’d awoken the People from the Great Sleep. A Day and Night of Remembrance was held for the dead, squares depicting their sacrifices were stitched into their family’s tunics, and a History Shawl bearing the price the Haladin had paid for their way of life had its first lines strung through the loom.

Her father fell to brooding, turning his sword over and over in his hands, running his fingers over the flat of the blade. He’d come for her and take her into the forest to practice her marksmanship with her child’s willow bow. Some days he was a harsh taskmaster, and she could never please him, but on others he would position her hands, his own hot and large as he cupped hers, and patiently adjust her aim. 

He was gone again now. News of the Dragon Glaurung’s approach shattered Turambar’s melancholy, and threw oil upon the restless fire in his breast. Thóriel had been standing beside him when he heard of the Dragon’s approach, and while many of the men about them quailed, their faces whitening and their hands seeking the shoulders’ of their children, Turambar had stood straighten, tall and fierce and proud. 

He had smiled at the news, a smile with pointy ends and a curve that promised death. Thóriel’s shoulders had thrown back, her chin rising to stand at his side. She would not shame him by proving unworthy to stand beside him.

Turambar had struck out to meet the Lord of Dragons with only two companions, Deloris and Hunthor. Thóriel thought they needed have bothered. Her father was worth an army.

There had been no recent news, though, and the people worried. Thóriel had found Brin weeping over her father Hunthor only yesterday, fearful he’d not return. Thóriel had restrained herself from scolding the girl for her lack of faith. Thóriel’s words were always taken the wrong way. What she would have said to help Brin find her strength would have been taken as cruelty; it always was.

She knew she was not particularly well-liked among the other children. They looked up to her with a certain amount of awe, not only because of her statue as Turambar’s ward, but because she never cried or shrunk from any feat set before her. Thóriel would prove herself no matter the cost. She did not wish herself in Brin’s place, popular as the younger girl was among the other children for her kindness and gentle ways.

Thóriel would not give into the seed of fear striving to take root in her heart. Her father was coming home; he had to. It didn’t matter that the more she dwelt on it, the more the yew bow took on the light of a goodbye, as if her father had known his time was running out. Her father was the strongest warrior alive. If anyone could rid the world of the terror of Glaurung, it was Túrin Turambar. 

“Fetch me the seed oil from the cupboard, Neithan.” Aunt Níniel wiped a flour-dusted hand over her brow, leaving a streak of white behind, before digging her hands back into the dough and putting her back into the kneading.

“Yes, Aunt,” Thóriel wove around the baking block, and cracked open the cupboard door. She shuffled through the flour and sugar jars, sealed tight against worms, and shifted the sack of salt to lift free the slender jug of seed oil.

“Just set it there,” Aunt Níniel nodded at a spare bit of space on the baking block as she folded the dough and pushed her heels into it. “Help me by chopping up the greens for the stew, won’t you?”

“Yes, Aunt,” Thóriel picked up the basket of greens, drawing some carrots from the tangle.

Thóriel shuffled aside the milk jug and basket of eggs to make room for her chopping. They worked in silence, Thóriel’s knife slicing slich-slich through the carrot’s bodies, and Aunt Níniel’s hands punching into the dough, her mouth pressing into deeper and deeper lines as she sunk into the labyrinth of thoughts always lurking in the silence. Turambar had been gone for three days with no news. 

The tension pulled out tighter and tighter, and Thóriel’s skin itched with it, her joints achy like an old man who could feel a storm brooding. It broke with a smack. Aunt Níniel slapped the dough down, and snatched the knife from Thóriel’s hands. 

“Enough of this. I’ll not sit ideally by, a prey to worry, when action calls me forth. I am no dumb beast purposeless without my master’s commands.” Aunt Níniel pulled Thóriel towards the door, leaving the supper to putrefy on the block. She marched down the hall of the sleeping rooms, stormed through her bedroom door and threw the lid back from a chest. From it she pulled an axe. 

“Come Neithan, we have a Folkmoot to call.”


	83. Chapter 68

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 68

Year 501 of the First Age

Thóriel spun, arms flung wide like a bird, tunic swirling about her knees. The glow of the campfires streaked red, and the sky was a blanket of stars above, with Mother Moon set like an oyster pearl in its midst. 

The drums tapped to the beat of fresh-tilled earth as the Drughu’s trumpets farewelled winter. The pipers whistled, and the fiddlers drew their bows over the strings at a pace edging towards chaos but sounded like euphoria. The Haladin’s hearts lifted into the rolling folds of a spring thunderstorm, only to plunge to the forest floor blossoming re-birth. The dancers’ bodies twirled and leaped in the celebration of the Feast of the Sowers’ Hope.

Thóriel tripped out of the spin with a laugh, and knocked into the dancer beside her. Her feet couldn’t walk straight, and she landed on her bottom in the grass. The dancer she’d bumped into came down atop her. 

The firelight caught in eyes gemstone-green, as only one of Drughu-blood could possess. She accepted Kor’s hand, and he swung her up from the ground as if she weighed no more than air. “Watch yourself there, Neithan. You’ll take an eye out with the way you’re swinging those pointy things you call elbows.” He laughed at his own joke. Thóriel huffed back, but her smile overcame her irritation. It was too fine a night to nurse a grudge over his teasing.

“You should be more careful with those logs you call feet, Kor,” she shot back, brushing down her backside.

“Right, off with you, brat!” He tried to pull her braid, but she darted away from the offending hand, plunging back into the rolling sea of dancers.

She found Meleth sat upon the Stool of Remembrance, a History Shawl spread over her knees and a cluster of youngsters crowded in close to hear her tale. Thóriel joined the group of youths on the grass at the Memory Holder’s feet. The youngest children were given the seats closest to Meleth so they could see all the vibrant details in the shawl’s pictures, following along as the tale unwound. Thóriel was too old to take up such a prime spot, and now watched the Memory Holder from the back rows. At least she didn’t have to stand like the adults.

Thóriel pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on their caps. Meleth was telling one of Thóriel’s favorite tales, and had just reached the best part where Haleth routed the Orcs, and pursued the murderers of her kin to the death. Thóriel’s eyes wandered over the many squares of pictures, following the trail of the Journey of Second Hope.

Her attention was disturbed when she received an elbow in the gut. She turned to scowl at the boy next to her. Fie was only a year younger than his brother Kor, and had his brother’s mischievous ways. He grinned at her, waggling his eyebrows and pointing to what he’d poked her so rudely to get her attention for. Thóriel followed his finger to see yet another of that brood, Lethi, Kor and Fie’s elder sister. 

The siblings were three of nine. Their mother had followed the ways of Drughu love and taken two husbands. One had been Dorlas, who Brandir Halad killed for his cowardice when the man shamefully abandoned Túrin and Hunthor in their pursuit of Glaurung. The other husband was one of the Drughu. 

Thóriel’s brow rose as she spotted what Fie was snickering over. Lethi sat awfully close to Duncroth, and he had his hand inched up the back of her tunic, settled quite snuggly on her bottom.

Fie leaned close to Thóriel, his mouth stretched wide in a smile, and his braids hitting Thóriel in the shoulder with his eagerness to share: “I’m telling Kor, and then I’m telling Mother. Lethi will be in _so_ much trouble.”

Thóriel pushed him off her, “Shh! I’m trying to listen.”

“You’re no fun, Neithan,” Fie pouted at her. “Don’t be mean or Kor and I won’t take you hunting next week.”

She had to bite back an acid remark, forced to make nice with him lest he carry through his threat and leave her behind. She wasn’t allowed more than a few hours walk outside the city alone, but Kor and Fie were older. With them she could go to the farthest reaches of the forest.

Fie poked her side. “You’re so easy to dupe. Stop taking everything so serious. I was only joking.” She rolled her eyes at him, and slapped at his digging finger. He was only being an annoyance as usual.

Fie left her in peace to listen to the rest of the story, only teasing her over her rapt attention. The Memory Holders may have been held in a respect only due the Halad, but the story of the Journey of Second Hope was both the most popular of their peoples’ tales, as well as frequently recounted. 

At the story’s conclusion, Thóriel sprang up, knees knocking into backs and earning glowers in her eagerness to be the one to help Meleth stand from the Stool of Remembrance. Meleth smiled at her, fitting her wrinkled hand into Thóriel’s, and rising to creaky knees. “Thank you, Daughter.”

“It is my honor, Mother.” Thóriel offered her shoulder, and the elder settled her frail hand atop it as they walked from the circle. 

Thóriel cast a glance back at the Stool of Remembrance. The Memory Holder who took the stool next was the truly ancient Hunleth. The History Shawl she carried was stitched with the tale of Halmir and the Great Boar Hunt. It was no hardship for Thóriel to turn away. The tale would have been entertaining, but not one of her favorites.

“You are kind, Daughter,” Meleth said as Thóriel helped her onto one of the benches drug out from the Obel Halad. Other elders, nursing mothers, and cripples were already resting there. They watched the dancers, content to pass the celebration in good company over revelry.

Thóriel’s mouth pulled down. “There aren’t many who would agree.”

Meleth patted the seat beside her on the bench, “Sit, Daughter.” 

Thóriel squeezed her body between Meleth and Reldreth, another elderly dame. Reldreth had a cane tucked between her legs, the raven craved into its head –neck arched, wings spread—twirled about as Reldreth’s fingers played with the stick’s stem. 

Reldreth turned to Thóriel, face cracking like a sunrise for a gap-toothed smile. She reached over to tap Thóriel’s chest, right over her heart (Thóriel tried not to shrink away when the elder’s hand brushed up against her budding breasts). “It’s what’s in here that matters, Daughter.”

Meleth nodded, “It’s the heart. Some folk, their heart’s gone to rot. Not yours. The shell may be a bit crusty, but there’s gold in there.” 

Heat lit Thóriel’s face, and she ducked her head. “Thank you, Mothers.”

“You’re a good girl,” Meleth said as if that decided things. “Now use those spry legs of yours to fetch these old women some of that sweet cake I’ve been smelling.”

Thóriel hopped up, heading straight for the laden tables. She picked up two tin plates, running her thumb absently over the Drughu designs edging them as she looked over the fare. When she spied the honey-glazed nut cakes, she reached to take a piece, only to have her hand swatted with a wooden spoon. 

“None of that, Neithan,” Fie’ mother had her hand settled on her hip, eying Thóriel like she was plotting some great mischief. “You wait for the rest of the children to eat.”

Thóriel frowned at the assumption of her flinching food, even though she shouldn’t be glaring at her elder. “I was taking some to Meleth and Reldreth, Mother. I wasn’t stealing.”

“Humph,” the woman tossed a glance over at the benches. “Very well then, but I’m watching you. I’ll know if this cake goes into any mouths but the elders.’”

“Yes, Mother,” Thóriel said through gritted teeth. She reached for the knife again to slice a piece, but another hand found it first. 

The hand was brown, as were all Haladin’s, and a ring sat upon the forefinger. The ring was of Drughu make, as all the Haladin’s metal things were. It was a handsome thing, extravagant for a people who adorned their bodies in little beside their honoring of Father Sun and Mother Moon. It had a broad band of silver, and a gem so dark a red it looked black in the firelight, set into its crown. She knew the ring’s owner even before her eyes traveled up the sleeve –woven with the finest dyes, telling the story of a proud heritage with pictures of the tunic owner’s skill with a bow and hunting prowess—up to the eyes of the biggest ass this side of the sea.

Avranc had a mocking smile on his face as he lifted the knife and cut two perfect slices of the cake, before scooping them neatly onto the plates. “You’re welcome.”

Thóriel made a face. She didn’t give the ‘thank you’ he didn’t deserve, and turned to stalk away. His hand circling her wrist halted her. She yanked free of his touch with a growl.

“Stop being so rude, Neithan! One would think you were raised by wolves the way you act sometimes.”

She spun around so violently one of the pieces of cake went flying off the end of the plate to smack right into Avranc’s oh-so-perfect tunic. It left a satisfying smear of honey on its slide to the ground.

“Eck! What is wrong with you? Hardang just gave me this tunic!” Avranc’s face was not so handsome with his mouth scrunched up like that. Thóriel was generally not interested in boys, but even she was not blind enough not to notice Avranc was the best looking boy in the city. Not that that made him any nicer.

Avranc had his hands held out to his sides as if the honey on his tunic was going to infect him. He looked at Thóriel if she was some creature crawled out of the wild. Thóriel snorted. The amusement was short-lived. Fie’ mother came bustling over to chide her for her wastefulness, and ordered her to go fetch a wet cloth.

Thóriel glared at Avranc before stomping off. He smirked back until Fie’ mother turned her tongue on him for just standing there like a ‘dumb ox.’ Thóriel’s step brightened into a spring, and her glare was forgotten with the music of Avranc’s scolding in her ears.

Thóriel didn’t drag her feet too long on her errand, and was soon returning with a damp rag. She tried to put her foot down over actually _cleaning_ Avranc’s tunic for him, but Fie’ mother said she’d made the mess, so she could clean it up. 

Thóriel’s brows stayed pinched as she was forced to touch his Majesty Ass. She scraped the rag over the sticky spot on his chest with more vigor than was strictly necessary (hoping she gave him a burse), but he didn’t complain. He was suspiciously quiet as she worked, and she shot narrowed-eyes up at him.

She found Avranc already looking back. His black eyes seemed to catch all the light and set them glittering, like gems. His skin was smooth and clear, glowing with an orange tint in the firelight. She pursed her lips when a little smirk curled his lips. He must really enjoy watching her scrub his stupid tunic. 

He raked a hand through his curls, tossing them back. His hair was exceptionally curly. It used to always slip free of its braid when he was child, even when his mother combed it with oils. Now he didn’t even bother with braids. She’d seen him fuss with his hair like that when he was flirting with girls (yuck!).

He snatched the rag out of her hands and tossed it away, seemingly completely recovered from the _trauma_ of a dirty tunic. He had the nerve to pick up her hand, gripping it tight when she tried to twist out of his hold. “How about a dance, Neithan?”

“I think I am going to be sick.” Kicking him in the shin was sure to get her in trouble. 

“Really, Neithan!” Fie’ mother had stayed within hearing distance. “I’ll be talking to the Matron about your manners, you can sure of that! If this is the way she’s been letting all the children in her care behave, I think it’s time the Folkmoot appointed a new Matron for the orphans!”

Thóriel bit her lip. She hadn’t meant to bring difficulties upon Matron. Matron would never be anything like a parent, but she did right by the orphans. “I apologize for my words, Mother.”

“Don’t apologize to me, Neithan, apologize to poor Avranc!” 

Thóriel grimaced. Avranc still had his hand about her wrist. His face would twist so sweetly if she kneed him in the crotch.

She wasn’t going to duck her head like a meek little bird to him. Her chin snapped up. She fisted the hand he’d entrapped, and all but hissed: “Forgive my words.”

Avranc’s thumb rubbed over the thin skin of her wrist, and though he was trying to conceal it, Thóriel saw his smirk. Finally he released her, “You’re forgiven.” She smothered a lip curl, and kept her face silent and still as stone. “Perhaps a dance would be a final apology.”

“And excellent suggestion.” Fie’ mother cut in before Thóriel could snap ‘no.’ “Here,” the dame dished out another two slices of the cake. “Run that over to the elders, and then, for once, be a good girl, Daughter, and dance with Avranc.”

Thóriel’s mouth pinched tight around her protest. She kept her back straight as she marched over to the benches.

Meleth took the plates from her. “What’s set that fearsome glower on your face?” She took Thóriel’s hand. “Come, tell Mother what troubles you.”

Thóriel looked back to see Avranc waiting for her by the tables. “Avranc wanted me to dance with him. He’s a—I don’t like him, and would have said no, only Fie and Kor’s mother is making me dance with him.”

Thóriel expected Meleth to pat her hand and tell her it wouldn’t be so bad. She was not expecting Meleth to narrow her own eyes at Avranc. “How old is that boy, now?” Meleth asked Reldreth.

“Hardang’s little cousin? Hmm, he must be nearly a man.”

“He’s 16,” Thóriel provided.

Meleth’s mouth pinched. “I see. You go along now, Daughter, and dance with him. I’ll be keeping an eye on that boy.”

Thóriel left the elders feeling fortified. Avranc hadn’t done himself any favors by drawing Meleth’s attention. Meleth was Manthor’s mother, a direct descended of Haleth, and the most respected of the Memory Holders. Avranc may have the protection of Hardang, the Halad, but he should be on his best behavior if he knew what was good for him.

Thóriel hid a smirk when she returned and saw Avranc trying to ignore the fixed stare from the benches. That would show him. Unfortunately she still had to dance with him.

“Well?” She folded her arms over her chest.

Avranc yanked his gaze away from the attention he was pretending to give his sleeve’s hem. He cleared his throat, a hint of pink climbing his neck. “Do you want to…?” He gesture vaguely at the weaving circles of dancing Haladin.

Thóriel humped, dropped her arms, and spun on her heel. Her braid slapped satisfyingly into his chest. She strode towards the dancers. The sooner they started, the sooner it would be over. Just when she broke the first ring of twirling bodies, a hand settling on her waist caused her to jump.

Avranc faced her, both his hands holding her waist and making her uncomfortable. She’d never actually danced with anyone but herself. Avranc had, and his confidence returned as he led her through the first steps. She couldn’t hand him the advantage, and was soon inventing her own steps, just so he didn’t know something she didn’t. 

His brows tightened when one of her improvising moves sent him tripping over his own feet. Pity he didn’t fall on his face. His hands resettled on her waist, firmer now, a challenge scrolled all over his face as she jutted her chin up at him. Then they were moving swift as diving hawks, and it was her turn to stumble to keep up. He turned them, and her hopping steps where cut off when he _lifted her into the air_. She tried to kick him, but the aim was off. 

She glared down at him from her new height, suspended in his arms. “Put me down, _now_!”

He took his time about it, lowering her by inches. “Don’t you like being the tallest in the land? I would have thought it of you, _Thóriel_.”

She hissed. No one had called her by that name in years. She planted her palm in his chest and pushed. “I’ve danced with you. Now leave me alone.”

She twisted out of his hold, but didn’t get two steps before he was gripping her shoulder. He made her feel small with him towering over her like that; his hand, big as a man’s, fitted into the hollow of her collarbone, consuming the slenderness of her shoulder. She wanted to bite him for turning her back into a child.

“I shouldn’t have called you that, I know. Don’t go.” It was the closest thing she’d heard like an apology from him since he went to live with Hardang. He was still an ass though.

He turned her, his hand slipping down to cage her upper arm, and she crossed her arms over her chest again. She was conscious of her growing body as she had never been before. She wished she couldn’t feel the small, squashy mounds pressing against her forearm. 

“What do you want? Why can’t you just leave me alone? I never did anything to you.” 

He stopped touching her, pulling his hand from her arm to stand with unfamiliar awkwardness before her. “I just…uh…you look, uh, nice tonight, Neithan.”

Her nostrils flared. How dare he mock her! Why was everything about making fun of them to him? 

They used to be friends, when she’d first come to live among the Haladin. He was nice to her when she’d been scared of every shadow, terrified the Orcs would find her. He was her first friend, but he hadn’t been that person for a long time. Now he was the kind of boy who laughed when people got hurt, and mocked oddities and weaknesses in others.

“Stop making fun of me, Avranc. I don’t have a fancy tunic to wear, but you know what? I don’t care. No amount of finery is going to make people like you more.”

Avranc’s mouth folded, looking genuinely hurt. She almost felt guilty, but he shouldn’t have been making fun of her. “I wasn’t…I just wanted to tell you you look nice, but you always look pretty.” 

Thóriel’s hands fisted against her elbows. What was this? She could almost believe him that he hadn’t meant to mock her if she hadn’t seen him play a similar game with Narci. Narci was a plain girl with a man’s hands and big bones. Avranc had been nasty to her just to entertain his hangers-on for the space of a few laughs. 

“Right, like I’m supposed to believe that.” She dropped her arms, keeping her hands fisted at her sides. She’d hit him if he tried to touch her again. She gave her meanest sneer and stalked off. He may be a bully, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t try to stop her leaving.

*

Fie was true to his word and took Thóriel hunting with his brother. A week after the Feast of the Sowers’ Hope found Thóriel hoofing it back to the city beside the two brothers, a brace of hares and a pair of quails strung over her shoulder. She would have liked to get a doe like Fie, but while she’d had a shot last evening, she couldn’t have hauled that much meat back to the city. Her yield would feed the Matron’s table for a few nights at least, giving the other children a break from porridge and lentils. 

No one starved in the city. If a widow was hungry someone was always there to split their own supper. If a man was injured and couldn’t work the fields, his place would be filled until he was healed enough to support his family. No child was ever cast out without bed or roof or even a meal of lentils and potatoes to fill their belly. To leave another in want was as alien to the Haladin as settling a dispute with violence. 

Fie hefted his sack of smoked and salted deer-meat. He’d been complaining good-naturedly about the weight for the last hour, trying to annoy his elder brother into taking more of his share. 

“All that hammering in the forge with Father, that’s what it is,” Fie kept up. “You’ve got arms of steel, you do.”

“And you have the endurance of a gelded rabbit.” Kor waggled his eyebrows at his bother.

“Oi!” Fie swung his sack of meat at his brother’s head. Kor ducked, his thick coil of hair whipping behind him. He came up laughing, strands of frizzy hair sticking out from his head like a bird’s crown. “Take that back! My stamina is—”

“Brother!” Kor jerked his thumb at Thóriel. Thóriel glared at both of them. She wasn’t a child or an idiot. She knew what they were talking about. 

Fie slipped an arm about her shoulders, leaning far too much of his weight on her. “Don’t worry; your baby ears are safe with us.” He tried to ruffle her hair, but she shoved the oaf off.

“Too bad my eyes aren’t safe.”

Kor cracked a laugh. “She’s got you there, Brother. The sight of you last night will be burned into both our eyes until the day Death’s Hunt finds us!”

“Shut up, both of you. I needed to take a piss.” Fie settled the sack back over his shoulder, attempting a sulky look, but failing spectacularly. “Not my fault little girls who have no business sneaking about at night were out of their beds.”

Thóriel’s “I wasn’t sneaking!” was overridden by Kor’s deep voice. “There are only two reasons a man has his goods out in the middle of the woods, and it didn’t look like a piss to me.”

“Kor, the girl!” Fie’ hands flapped behind Thóriel’s head. Now she wasn’t sure what they were talking about, but decided she’d rather not know.

“You’re both idiots,” she settled for an insult, and quickened her pace to outdistance the brother’s continued quipping.

She was the first to see it: a curl of black smoke rising in the west, right over where the city should stand. The tree foliage cluttered the view, but there was enough of one to wrench a cry out of her. They were running for the city, legs pumping, kills discarded on the forest floor, noses picking up the scent of the fire as they broke through the Outer Circle of the city. Their ears flooded with angry shouts.

When they reached the First Circle, the sight of the Obel Halad’s burning roof met them. It only took one glance to known the hall was passed saving. Thóriel only had the one glance to spare, for she had to jump out of the way as Hardang and Avranc came barreling towards her. She thought she’d remember Avranc’s face until Death’s Hunt downed her. It was the picture of a terrified child.

A mob of _their own people_ were chasing them, and Thóriel had no idea what was going on. She spotted Manthor in the crowd, but shouldn’t he be patrolling the Eastern border? There was a stranger amongst the crowd too, an old man, somehow both shriveled up like a prune and burning too fiercely at the same time. That burning, it sent a twist of anguish in her gut. Túrin had burnt, burnt, burnt, as if a fever were set in his flesh and was eating him from the inside out. 

Then everything was happening too fast. Hardang and Avranc were flying past her, but a spear was sent whooshing out from the knot of the pursuing mob. There was no time to do more than cry out a warning before the spear struck Hardang between the shoulder blades. He stumbled and fell with a terrible scream. Avranc spun. The look on his face when he saw Hardang lying in the dirt, spear protruding like a flag from his back, was like watching a man take a horse’s hoof to the face.

Avranc slumped to his knees, screaming like someone had reached into his stomach and was yanking up his self out through the hole of his mouth. The mob ceased being a mob and became the Haladin again. A people sickened by their own brutality. None dared to approach Avranc as he staggered over to Hardang. 

Thóriel was close enough to hear the wet sounds of Hardang’s dying breaths, his grunt when Avranc turned him on his side, and the desperate, lost last words Avranc whispered to him: “Don’t go, don’t go, please, Hardang, Cousin. Father.” Hardang’s eyes wouldn’t focus on Avranc’s face as he rattled out his final breath.

Avranc stared down at the graying face, hands running over shoulders, neck, hair, face, as if he could pull Hardang back. When the reality of Hardang’s death struck Avranc, the face he raised to the watching Haladin was suffused with hate.

It was Manthor who breached the shock of the moment. “Best you get going, Avranc. We are sorry it came to this. It is not the Haladin’s way. But if you stay you’ll have to answer for your deeds these last two days. You shot at me a moment ago, and that is not even addressing the wrongs you committed against Húrin.”

Avranc’s hands convulsed in Hardang’s tunic. His focus tunneled down to the figure of Manthor. Avranc released Hardang’s body, picked up his bow, and stood, face set with vengeance upon Manthor.

“Go on now, boy.” Manthor jerked his chin at the road out of the Circles. “Or stay and face the judgment of the Folkmoot.”

“Should we let him go armed?” Someone asked. “He did just try to kill you with that bow, Manthor.”

Thóriel frowned, flicking a glance at the bow in Avranc’s hands. If Avranc had wanted to kill Manthor, Manthor would be dead. Avranc was the best bowman of the Haladin. He didn’t miss a shot.

Avranc didn’t wait for the brief quiet of the shock of Hardang’s death to pass and the Haladin to work themselves up against him again. He took two steps back, glanced one last time at Hardang’s body, before he turned and fled.

Thóriel stepped towards Hardang’s body. It looked gruesome just lying there in the road like that. Manthor moved with brisk strides for the body. “You don’t need to see this, Daughter. Go find my mother, she will look after you.”

Thóriel resented being treated like an innocent who had never seen death before. She’d seen much worse. But that she would not dwell on, not with the smoke from the burning hall searing her lungs. 

She did not argue with Manthor. Now Hardang was dead, did that make Manthor Halad? He was the last one of Haleth’s blood suited to rule. Brin was too young and Meleth too old, and while Thóriel herself was descended from Haleth through Túrin’s grandmother, she was the only one living who knew that secret.

The hall drew attention like a magnet, and as Thóriel’s feet dragged closer she saw she wasn’t the only one watching it burn. Women had their hands pressed over their mouths, some of the youngest children were crying, and men watched the heart of their city burn with faces grim, some trembling, some remorseful, some unapologetic.

A timber cracked, and a portion of the roof caved in, feeding the devouring flames. The Stool of Remembrance she’d listened to so many Memory Holders tell their tales upon, burned. The tapestries of their people’s history, preserved in weaves as other nations remembered theirs in books, burned. Haleth’s axe and shield mounted high and proud to the wall of the Obel Halad, burned. The place Túrin had carved stripes into one of the tables with his knife when he was in a particularly foul mood, and the cracked stone of one of the hearths Níniel used to point out to Brandir so many times it became a joke between them, burned. All gone now. Burned to a crisp, just like Nargothrond had.

“Neithan,” Meleth settled a thin hand on Thóriel’s shoulder. “Come away. There is someone you should meet.”

Thóriel followed Meleth’s lead with a face clenched tight against tears. Weeping never brought anyone back, or fixed even one wrong in the world. Níniel taught her that. Her aunt never wept vain tears. Neither did Thóriel, not even when the Haladin returned with Túrin’s body and the news of Níniel’s loss. 

She’d requested they make Túrin’s burial mound the same as Finduilas,’ with a tomb for Níniel there beside his. They asked her what she wanted on the marker of Túrin’s tomb. She could think of nothing that would encompass who her father had been. In then end she chose words conveying his greatest feats: Túrin, Conqueror of Fate, Slayer of Glaurung.

The Enemy thought to use the curse on Húrin’s line to wield a mighty weapon in the free people’s heart? Túrin defied him in the very act of his death. He’d reached for glory, seeking ever to strike a great blow against the Enemy, to have _lived_ for something. And he proved he had in the end: he freed Arda from one of its greatest terrors.

Túrin struggled all his life for a measure of peace, of happiness. Was it so very much to ask? But even through his final acts, Thóriel knew, in the deep places of her heart she did not allow to surface, that he had not found peace. 

What was she to write on his tombstone, then? Here lies Túrin who died in despair, slain by his own hand? Her father had molded her strong, had _demanded_ strength from her, but she was not that strong, not strong enough to look the truth in the eye.

“Here, Daughter,” Meleth stopped before the stranger. The old man fixed her with blue eyes that burned too brightly out of a faded face. “This is Húrin, Túrin’s father, and this,” Meleth smoothed a hand over Thóriel’s hair, “Is Neithan. Túrin’s ward who came to us from the captives of the Elven city Nargothrond.” 

Húrin’s hair was exactly like Níniel’s. He had its yellow color and its thick corkscrews. Túrin looked nothing like his father or sister; he was his mother’s son. Perhaps Thóriel should have sickened at the evidence of Níniel’s undeniable kinship with Túrin, but she didn’t. She’d grown up seeing them together, spent nights wishing she was their daughter by birth. To her the thought of Túrin and Níniel together was as natural as most children viewing their parent’s union. 

She rolled the title ‘grandfather’ over in her mind as the old man stared at her, mute. It did not fit right. She had hazy memories of her grandfather Orodreth, and he had been nothing like this hawk-eyed being who trod the ground between broken and ignited.

“You are not my son’s ward,” Húrin spoke slowly, but every word was rough, and drew the attention of the others in the First Circle as Túrin’s commanding voice used to draw every eye. “You are my son’s daughter.” 

Thóriel went rigid, but the reaction the words received from the gathered Haladin was not what she’d been expecting. There were some murmurs of surprise, but there were also many heads bobbing in agreement. Húrin had only voiced what they had long suspected. “What is your name, girl?”

“Neithan,” the name fell from her lips by habit. She’d been wearing it for years.

“Not the one you’re trying to hide behind something that cannot be escaped with. Your real name.”

“Thóriel.” Her neck arched, and she met his disturbing eyes with the courage of Túrin’s daughter. She would make her father proud, even if he was no longer here to see it.

Húrin grunted. “Use it then. You’ll not slip passed the Doom with trickery.” Now the crowd did shift around them, disturbed by Húrin’s words. 

Thóriel clenched her jaw, refusing to bow her head under the weight of their stares. Now she understood why her father wanted her to hide her lineage and take another name. Túrin had been wiser than his father, and understood the hearts of men more fully when it was fear driving them.

A hand light as spun air fell on her shoulder, and Meleth’s voice, not yet cracked with age, carried through the crowd. “That’s enough of such talk, I should say. Our Thóriel has been with us since she was just a small child, and has brought no dooms upon our people. Túrin, yes, and yourself as well! But Thóriel has dwelt amongst us peacefully for years. I’ll hear no more talk of doom.”

Húrin’s brow clouded like a thunderstorm. “The arm of Morgoth should not be underestimated. You know nothing of what I have spoken. Come, girl, we will leave this place before you bring ruin upon it.”

Thóriel stared at his outstretched hand. He beckoned her forward with impatience. But his eyes, darting to the sides like something hunted, flashing with madness. Thóriel stepped away from his hand, stepped back from the touch that she suddenly knew would burn hot as her father’s skin against hers. She did not want to leave with this stranger and his inflamed eyes and whip-crack voice. This was her home. These people her people. 

Húrin let his hand drop. His craggy lips gripped each other tight, and the look he threw down the length of her body told of both her disloyalty and hastening calamity. She was relieved when Manthor led Húrin from the city. 

Manthor never came home from escorting Húrin to the forest’s borders. The men who’d gone with them returned with Avranc bound before them, and the report of how Avranc had shot Manthor through the heart. The city was thrown into chaos. Manthor had been their last viable contender for the position of Halad. 

An emergency Folkmoot was called, but no agreement could be reached over who would lead the people. Many called for Avranc’s blood, an unheard of punishment amongst the Haladin, even for murder. At last Meleth stood and declared she would act as Halad until her health failed and Death’s Hunt uncovered her. 

Meleth asked the Mother Moon to bless her with long life so she could live to see Brin come into womanhood and take up the place of Halad as the last of Haleth’s line. No one mentioned Thóriel’s blood, almost like they believed if they brought attention to her connection to Húrin and his cursed line, the threat of Doom lurking in the backs of their minds would be erased.

Though Avranc had murdered her last son, Meleth was wise, and called an end to the circle of bloodshed. It was not the Haladin’s way, she remained the people, to deal out vengeance. Avranc was banished from the Forest of Brethil, and became an outcast in a world grown perilous.


	84. Chapter 69

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 69

Year 509 of the First Age, Forest of Brethil

Thóriel crouched low in the underbrush, keeping her breathing steady and silent. The doe’s ears flicked, head coming up from nibbling on the grass. Thóriel fitted an arrow to the string, and slowly, oh so slowly, pulled to a draw. 

She recited the prayer she rolled out by habit whether it was Orc or beast she hunted: _Fly straight, friend arrow, strike true. May Oromë’s arm lend me strength, and Varda’s stars guide me ever home._ Her fingers curled strong and sure over the Elven inscription. She’d memorized the words Túrin had read out for her. She used to trace each letter as she said them, as if her eyes could connect the signs to the words if her mouth repeated them enough times.

The arrow fit snug against her ear, the tickle of the fletching familiar as a friend’s fingers on her cheek. If she closed her eyes she could smell her father –metallic, like blood in the mouth, campfire smoke, and mannish sweat, fresh from a border patrol—she could feel his hand wrapped about hers, hot, guiding, and sword-calloused so that she never forgot he could kill like a wolf.

She let the arrow fly. It took the doe in the chest. The doe managed two stumbling steps before it went down. Thóriel was beside in it moments, knife merciful and quick as it severed the doe’s windpipe. 

She was cutting the arrow out of the deer when she heard a twig snap. Another arrow was in her bow and swung towards the sound with the speed of one who had lived long under the reality of Orcs. The Haladin had lost too many fighters –men, and the women after when there weren’t enough males to fill the patrols—after Doriath fell. 

There were no outposts in the North, no allied lands against the Darkness to help the Haladin hold it at bay. It was only a matter of time now before they fell like Dorthonion and Hithlum had fallen, and the last of the Edain died in battle, but not in chains. Slavery was not an option for her. She would save her people from such a fate.

As a figure stepped free of the camouflaging undergrowth, it hailed her, hands open to offer her palms: “I come without ill intent.”

Thóriel did not lower her bow. She did not recognize the man’s voice, and could not see his face beneath the shadow of his forest-green cloak. “Who are you? Show yourself or I will shoot you as an outlaw and ruffian!” 

The Haladin had almost as much trouble of late with other Men as they did Orcs. Some were Men sworn to the service of the Enemy, others were rough Men who served no one and took what they wanted from all. It was the Haladin’s misfortune that such Men were migrating to the questionable refuge of fallen Doriath on their Eastern border.

The man’s hands rose slowly to the edge of his hood and lowered it. His face was unshaven, sporting a black beard that’s close crop showed the signs of minor maintenance. His hair was a mass of black curls pushing out of the tie seeking to keep them in order, and his clothing looked like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. Overall, he was relatively clean for a man stepped out of the wild. She imagined the smell of him wouldn’t even chase off the game for a mile around.

“You do not know me, do you Thóriel?” A wry twist of lips took his mouth.

She looked into his face. His eyes were changed, hardened like his life must have been these last eight years, but his lashes still curled thick around eyes that had once strung all the girls after them.

“Avranc?” Her arm released the draw, and her knees straightened out in shock. She could see Avranc in the stranger now. He was weathered, and his clothes had seen better days, maybe even a battle of two by some of those stains. But he had Avranc’s bones, eyes, and that hair that still defied bonds.

“Hello, Thóriel.” His eyes trailed over her as if he could drink this moment up. “Don’t you look well.” The words were softy mocking. Of her or himself it was difficult to tell.

Thóriel plucked the arrow from the string, sliding it back into its quiver and the bow over her shoulder. “You should not be here.” She turned away, pulling out her knife and crouching beside the doe. “You are an outcast. You have no business on Haladin lands.”

There was silence behind her. She drew the knife along the deer’s belly, and a spill of dark blood ran over her hands and began seeping into the ground. She started gutting.

She heard cautious steps approach, but didn’t turn around. Her head was tilted, and her eyes watched for movement from their corners. He might kill her, but her instincts were telling her no, and she’d learned to trust those. 

“I found something in the forest, in Doriath.” She stiffened at the mention of that place; the home of bandits, murderers, and rapists. “Children, fending for themselves in the wild. They would not be safe there. It is not…it is not a nice place, Thóriel. I thought the Haladin might take them in.”

Thóriel yanked the stomach from the deer’s belly, taking care not to split it and corrupt the meat. Her hands were coated in blood passed the wrists. She threw the stomach away, twisting on her heels to get a look up at Avranc’s face. 

It was blank, free even of the perpetual smirk she remembered so well. His jaw jumped under her unwavering stare. She wouldn’t release him until the rock of his face cracked open and all the slime underneath seeped out. 

His lip curled back. She had him. But the moment of certainty was fleeting as a hare’s flight. While his mouth wore contempt, his eyes weren’t aloof enough to carry off the expression. They were looking at her with too much intensity for the boy who wouldn’t have cared overmuch if some children he’d stumbled upon in the woods starved to death. “Are you coming, then? Or is it too much to ask you to take a few hours out of your day to assist inconsequential beggar children?”

She scoffed, “Aren’t you a fine one to speak so prettily, _Avranc_.”

His eyes hooded, but he didn’t flip them away with a careless shrug. For a man living the life of an outcast, he hadn’t learned to conceal his emotions well (or maybe he’d learned exactly how to play them). “I do not suppose a woman like yourself would understand the difference between a man devoid of compassion, and a spoilt child raised to embrace selfishness and arrogance of nature.”

She stiffened. “A woman like me?” She shouldn’t bother rising to his barbs. She’d learned long ago how cleverly he could spin words back around to slice their maker.

He smiled. It was his first mistake, for the smile wobbled in the corners. It was supposed to be lazy, cocky, but it revealed the exact opposite. Its lines revealed a mouth grown weary with this farce. “Yes, like you, Thóriel. You are too honorable to comprehend those who have none.” 

There wasn’t anything like scorn in the words. They ignited her anger. He didn’t have a right to be anything but the low-life scum he’d shown himself to be in their youths.

“And where are these children you found in the forest?” She arched a brow at him. “The ones so important you would dare defy the ruling of the Folkmoot for? Hmm?”

His mouth turned bitter, and she thought: Now the lies are stripped away, and your true purpose is revealed! He would transform from this quiet, weary man pretending he would mourn some urchins’ deaths back into a man of pettiness and cruelty. 

His face indeed hardened, but it was not to become someone else. He became again the kind of man who could have survived the cesspit of Doriath. “If you will come with me, I will lead you to them.”

She was wrong-footed. She felt like she’d failed in some way. She stood, fingers tight about the knife, and cast a long look back the way he’d come. What if this was a trap he’d set for her, and she fell for it like so many of the other children used to fall for his games?

“Go and bring them here. I will wait.” She turned challenging eyes back on him. But after a moment she found it was her eyes sliding off his stony face, away from eyes that seemed both spiked and fragile with sadness.

He started back the way he’d come. “I will bring them,” his voice lacked the drawl of mockery which would have let her recognize him immediately and slide the image of this roughened man seamlessly over the memory of him as a youth.

She watched him merge with the underbrush. Had she been paranoid? She brushed the doubt away, and began working on the deer again. These were no times to give into impulses of mercy. These were hard lands, home to a hardened people. She couldn’t afford to offer him trust only to be proved the fool. 

This wasn’t about him or her or how either of them had changed; it was about keeping her people safe and every able-bodied Haladin (including herself) alive to fight the Shadow another day. She wouldn’t have advised one of the guards under her command to follow a known murderer into the woods. She would not be made to feel guilty for using her common sense.

Thóriel had finished building a fire and staking the first chunks of meat over it to smoke by the time Avranc returned. She looked up from where she sat, crossed-legged on the grass, a bowl of water in her lap and a pile of washed meat stacking up on the tarp beside her. 

They were Elves. That was her first, shocked thought. One of the Elf children had silver hair that glinted metallic in the sunlight, and the second had hair black and straight enough sunlight slipped through it like white jewels. 

The silver-haired child clung to Avranc, both his small hands wrapped about Avranc’s one. The delicate bones of his face, a certain unique shine in his eyes, a flawlessness about his skin, made Thóriel think: yes, an Elf-child. 

The black-haired one was older, perhaps 9 years old, and had eyes that looked out at the world with suspicion. He walked beside the other child who could have been his smaller twin. He stared at Thóriel with a fierce little look on his face, hand wrapped about his brother’s arm in a gesture of pure protectiveness. And while he came with Avranc, that wary glare would flicker up to the man beside him every few steps.

Thóriel settled the bowl on the tarp and stood, wiping her hands on a rag as they drew near. The older boy stopped first, a good distance from her and the fire. His eyes trailed once to the smoking meat, before they fastened on the adults again. The children were not skin and bone, but their faces were thin, and their dirty, patched clothing hung too loosely from their bodies.

Avranc halted when the boy did, not attempting to take the younger child further than the boy’s reach. The young one wasn’t looking at Thóriel at all, nor was he looking at the meat, his huge eyes were staring up at the sky. They held a shimmer of Elven-light but also a vacantness, as if the boy were looking passed the veil of the world and into some other one.

Thóriel tossed the rag down. “Well, it looks like they could use a meal.”

Avranc settled a hand on the smaller boy’s shoulder, the hardness of his face easing. “Yes, we would appreciate it.” He turned to the older boy, “Eludor, this is Thóriel. She is one of the people I was telling you about. Will you take Elumir to sit? You need not sit too close if you like.”

Eludor crossed his arms over his boney chest. 

“Thóriel is not going to hurt you or Elumir. She is going to help.” Avranc dropped into a crouch to meet the boy at eye-level, taking away the threat of mobility and height. “You have eaten food I have brought you. I know you do not trust me, but did any harm befall you from that?” When the boy’s chin still set in defiance, Avranc gestured to Elumir, “Look at Elumir, he is hungry. Your brother needs to eat.”

Eludor’s flickered a glance to his brother, hands balling against his elbows. Elumir’s eyes wandered from the sky to Eludor’s. The smile stretched across his face was purity. There wasn’t an inch of its curves hiding any ulterior motive, any desire but to see Eludor return the gesture. He did, as if he couldn’t help himself. 

“It is all right, Eluréd,” Elumir said, and Thóriel frowned at the name. She’d heard it before. It only took a moment to place it. “The Eagle-lady will not hurt us. Her heart is not like the bad Men or the Soul-rot ones. She is all shinny inside, like Avranc.” 

With that pronouncement, Elumir slipped his hands from Avranc’s and skipped ahead. His brother followed, hands clenched about a crudely made dagger in his belt –Orcish make—and came to stand beside his brother like a shield when Elumir stopped before Thóriel. 

“Hello, my name is Elurín, only Avranc says we should have new names. I am Elumir now. I like my new name. Eluréd used to give me pretend names too, but they weren’t as good. One time Eluréd went to trade with the Soul-rot ones, and he named me Ronkûk. Eluréd says they like it when we use their language, but I don’t because it cuts my tongue up. Eluréd has his own Soul-rot name. I don’t like it.” 

Eludor curled his arm about his brother’s shoulders, and Elumir stopped talking to tilt his head back into Eludor’s shoulder and smile up at him like he was the sun and moon and stars. Eludor stood tense at his brother’s side, his hand not leaving his dagger as he met Thóriel’s eyes with as much threat as a child his age could muster.

Thóriel looked over the boys’ heads to find Avranc’s gaze. He didn’t look as disturbed as she felt to hear of these children trading with Orcs. Perhaps Elumir had told him before and he’d already grown accustomed to the knowledge, or maybe it wasn’t a thing unheard of among such men as those amassing in Doriath.

There was the matter of who these children were, but that would wait until they had some grub in their bellies. Thóriel turned to gather the wrapped rations from her pack, but the movement was too sudden for the elder boy. One moment he had his hand about his brother, standing like a normal boy, the next he was before Elumir, knife drawn and teeth bared like an animal.

Thóriel froze, raising her hands slowly, palms out for the child’s dilated eyes to follow. “I am going to reach into my pack now for some food.”

“The Haladin women bake wonderful bread. You have not eaten until you have had their pecan-loaves, or their honey. Does Tislin still make her honey-bread, Thóriel? I used to dream about that stuff.” Avranc’s voce was friendly and unthreatening as he sat himself in the grass by the fire (putting distance between himself and the wild-eyed Eludor). Avranc turned the spitted meat over the fire. “This looks excellent. Are you hungry Elumir?”

“Uh-huh.” Elumir dropped his knees into the ground beside his brother, and leaned forward to drape his body over Eludor’s back. “Don’t worry, Eluréd. I will sing all the bad things away.” 

The hunted look receded from the boy’s eyes, and he looped an arm back, twisting it around his brother’s waist to pull the smaller body against his side. He didn’t loosen his hold on the dagger or take his eyes off Thóriel. He watched her as she reached into her pack and pulled out bread, apples, and almonds, placing each down atop the tarp for the boy’s inspection.

“Haladin-made bread,” Avranc had a steady grin on his face as he pointed it out to Eludor. “You should try some.”

Eludor darted a glance over to Avranc, but seemed to take comfort from Avranc’s non-threatening position, and eased out of his crouch enough to snatch the bread from the tarp. He brought it to his nose to sniff, eyelids fluttering at the scent. But though his mouth must have started watering, he passed it to his brother first.

Elumir hummed as he tore off a chunk and stuffed it into his mouth. “Good, isn’t it?” Avranc asked. The boy nodded, giving Avranc a grin and handed the bread to his brother. 

Eludor took the bread and stared down at it a moment, before coming to a decision. He slipped the knife back into his belt, and picked up Elumir’s hand. He led Elumir to a seat in the grass close to Avranc (keeping the fire between Thóriel and them). Elumir immediate curled himself about Avranc’s waist, and Avranc’s hand dropped as if by habit into the silver hair. Eludor watched them from where he sat on his brother’s other side as he sunk his teeth into the bread.

They sat like that, huddled, as the meat cooked. Thóriel tossed the apples and sack of almonds to Avranc, not attempting to come closer. As Elumir munched on the nuts, he began talking. At first he commented on ordinary things like the food’s flavor, strange as some of his analogies were. Then he pointed out things in the clearing to Avranc and his brother, things most eyes would have overlooked or considered of no importance compared to tracking enemies or searching for edible roots and berries. But eventually his chatter turned back to his new name.

“Elumir, Elumir. It sounds like its flying. Or maybe swimming: Ellll-uuuu-mirrr. It is much better than my other names, yes Eluréd?” Eludor grunted around a huge bite of apple. Following some pattern of thought lost of Thóriel, Elumir told Avranc, as if picking up a previous conversation: “I never went with Eluréd. He said it was too dangerous, but if it was he should not go, should he? He didn’t listen. I wish he would listen. He said the Soul-rot ones have things, important things, we need. Eluréd gave me a name, even if I didn’t go, that way it was like we were going together. I wish we didn’t trade with the Soul-rot ones, only Eluréd said we must, but I didn’t like looking at them –inside. They are all bound up, and something cut up their insides and twisted them about. It scares me.”

Avranc’s fingers slipped through the silver hair, not pausing once as the child talked of trading with the Enemy. “It is over now. You will never have to live that life again. I cannot promise you will never know danger,” his gaze rose to seal with Eludor’s, “but with the Haladin you will not have to look after yourselves. You will have many mothers and fathers working to keep you safe.” 

Eludor’s shoulders hunched and his fingers curled about his brother’s ragged shirt, burying themselves in the fabric. He said nothing. Elumir spoke for them, “We want to be safe.”

“I want you to be safe too,” Avranc’s voice was no more than a breath. The words encompassed both the boy curled up in his lap, and the boy curled into himself.

Thóriel looked away. She poked at the spitted meat, testing its readiness. Avranc wasn’t anything like she remembered. People could change, but so drastically? The deer leg was juicing nicely. Its fats dripped into the fire, making it sizzle, and there was a fine crisp to the outer-layer of flesh. 

She swung the spits from the fire, and pulled out her knife to saw off a slice. A broad leaf served to keep fingers from burning, and she held out two servings for the children. Avranc shifted Elumir from his lap, rising to take them from her. He nodded his thanks both for the share and that she had respected Eludor’s discomfort with her.

When the children had set their teeth into the venison, tearing at it and smearing their faces and fingers with grease as if no one had taught them manners (or they’d long forgotten them), Thóriel caught Avranc’s eye. She jerked her head at the tree line. He rose as she did, pausing to assure the children he would return in a moment, and followed Thóriel from the campfire. She could feel Eludor’s eyes on their backs until the forest took them from sight. 

Thóriel folded her arms over her chest as Avranc came to a stop facing her. “Where did you find them?”

“Doriath, the forest,” he waved a hand. “Nowhere particular, just some cave they had been living in.”

Thóriel looked back towards the campfire. The foliage concealed its glow and the two boys with it. “They are supposed to be dead. The Elf-war was three years ago. They have been living like _that_ , in the wilds, trading with Orcs, for three years?”

“No one found their bodies, it was just assumed. They were so young…who would have thought they could survive in the wild?”

Thóriel slid her hands from their resting place against her elbows. “You gave them new names. That is wise. The Haladin may not have had more than a bare trade alliance with Doriath under Dior’s rule, but even we knew the names of his children.”

“Yes,” Avranc’s brow pinched, looking back the way they’d come. “But their appearance is very striking.”

“Elumir…it is not only the color of his hair that must be hidden.”

“I know. The Haladin will not hurt him for being different, but I cannot speak for any other people. I know little of Elven kind. I have only met a few over the years.” He looked at her sideways, but she kept her face still and her mouth silent. “The Doriath queen was their ancestor though, was she not? From all accounts she was one of the Elven gods from their lands in the West.”

“So the stories say.” Thóriel rubbed her fingers over the shape of her mouth.

“You will take them, then?” Thóriel’s gaze flickered back to his at the note of anxiety crept into his voice. 

“I? No. I do not believe that would go well at all. But you have my leave, as the Warden of the Northern March, to escort them to the city.”

Avranc’s lips parted, a hundred thoughts swooping over his face, and yet only one settling, only one mattering: longing. He wanted to go home (if only for a day). “Thóriel, I…yes, I will take them.”

An awkward silence shouldered itself between them now the distraction of the children’s immediate future was decided. Avranc cleared his throat and spoke. It was easy to talk of war and protection plans, second nature in these day; a conversation every soul still resisting the Darkness had a hundred times with their neighbors and a hundred more in their head. “How are the Haladin holding up since the Elf-war?”

“I am sure you can imagine now we are surrounded by enemies on all sides.” It came out more waspish than Thóriel had intended. She amended: “We have had too many losses, losses we cannot afford. The city is full of children and the old, and the border guard has too few axes and bows. We are worn down with it, but we will not lie down before the Enemy’s rolling belly.” 

“We are the Haladin, and this is _our_ land.” Her tongue slid into the words every Haladin learned at their grandmother’s knee, and Avranc said them along with her. His face revealed surprise in their wake, as if the words had been pulled up from his soul. 

They locked eyes for a moment of shared heritage, but it did not extend into kinship. He was still Avranc, and what he had been could not be so easily forgotten, nor his past deeds undone. 

He looked away, the line of his jaw sharp. His next words weren’t anything she’d expected. “I have heard rumors of other Edain migrated south. Some escapees of Dor-lómin –Hadorians and what is left of the Bëorings. They have made a settlement near the Mouth of Sirion with the Elves.”

“I had not heard of any other free Edain. That is fortunate news.” It was, but not terribly important. There would be no help from that quarter. They were alone.

Avranc angled back to face her. His expression was set. “We cannot stay here. You know this, Thóriel. I know this. Only the blind would fail to acknowledge that the Haladin will perish here if we do not go South.”

Thóriel’s lip curled. “Run away? Leave our land, our home, like rabbits flushed from a thicket? Is that your council, Avranc?”

The skin about his eyes twitched, tightened. “Is your pride worth the lives of our children? The survival of our people?”

She took a step towards him, putting herself close enough to feel the heat from his exhaled breaths. “With what right do you come here, to _Haladin lands_ , and tell us what to do? You have not been a Haladin for so long you have forgotten what it means to be one. You speak of our people as if we would wish to continue existing without our land, a home to call ours. You speak of our children as if there is some life waiting for them in the South, but there is only prolonged death. We are already dead, but we can choose our ending with honor and meet it with pride. Such is all we have left.”

Avranc’s mouth parted, sharp breaths hissing in through the gleaming row of teeth. “You have become a fool. And a selfish one. As blind as your _father_ was to all desires but your own. Who are _you_ to decide the fate of hundreds? Who are you to choose your precious dreams of glorious death over another’s of survival? Just because you have given up doesn’t mean everyone else has.” 

She hit him in the face. He cried out, staggered back, clutching his cheek. “I have given up _nothing_!” She balled up her hand and sent it flying into his stomach. She attacked him like she wanted to attack fate, like she wanted to pound the net of war and crouching Doom into the dust.

He struck back. The heel of his palm punched her in the shoulder, and his leg swept out to knock her feet out from under her. She rolled to land with the balls of her feet in the dirt, thighs bunched and ready to push off. 

Hands out like an eagle’s talons, she shot up into him, taking him down. His knee got her in the stomach as they fell into the earth, and she lost enough breath for him to slam her onto her back. She bucked under him, determined to throw his greater weight off and win back the advantage, but he’d grown strong and clever during his years in the wild. He was able to keep her pinned to the ground like a moth upon a board.

She snarled up at him, snapping her teeth at his face when he brought it too close. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow, and his storm of curls puffed over his shoulder to pillow on the leaves and in her face. His hands were holding her wrists over her head, and she twisted until the bones hurt and the skin cried out against his digging nails.

He watched her struggle under him, hissing and snarling at him. He had the comfort of his weight and advantageous position to sit on, while she was left vulnerable. She raged against him. Why did it have to be _him_ who defeated her? 

Avranc, who had always been the best at everything he set his mind to in their youths. The one the adults took special notice of, praising him for his skill with the bow, his cleverness of mind, one of the few taught to read and write. And of course, the fairest too look upon (save only her, but the face had never won her admires and slipped sweets like his, for hers had always been too quick to fall into frowns). 

“Would you stop already?” His chest pressed her deeper into the leaves and creeping moss of the forest floor. “I was not the one who attacked you. I would let you up if you just calmed down.”

He sounded so reasonable, so in control. She hated him all over again because she was burning up inside, burning and burning, and _this_ couldn’t be her end, this couldn’t be the sum of her life. She was the legacy of Túrin Turambar and Finduilas Finwëion; she couldn’t fall before she’d lived. She was supposed to slay Dragons and taunt Orcs as they whipped her (like her mother had, always forcing the attention to herself, away from Thóriel). She was supposed to have lived for something, been born for more than a life lived in shadows hunting a few petty Orc bands but never doing more than poking at the Enemy with a needle. She wasn’t supposed to die here in Brethil a forgotten (unknown) name in history. What was the point of existing at all if one didn’t make their life worth remembering? 

There were tears on her cheeks. Tears of rage, of helplessness. Avranc had it all wrong. She wasn’t the one keeping the Haladin here. It was the hundred other hearts exactly like hers. All refusing to surrender to the Darkness, to die refugees in the South, homeless and so weary of the running they went out like a puff of dust. That wouldn’t be their fate. They wouldn’t allow it.

“Thóriel,” Avranc said her name like it was supposed to mean something.

She stilled, but this wasn’t surrender. He was wrong, but she didn’t feel the need to show him so with her fists anymore. He released her wrists, his palms moving down to press into the soil by her head and lift some of his weight from her. But he didn’t roll off.

“Thóriel.” Her name said like that again. She frowned up at him. His mouth twitched, and his thumb came over to brush the line between her brows. She shook it off. “You will attract wrinkles before the rest of us with how much you swing that glower around.” His fingers found her skin again, touching the trail of a tear. “You are just the same as I remember.”

His mouth descended on hers, and the deepness of his voice clicked together in her mind. She wasn’t accustomed to noticing such things, and when she did catch a man looking at her, it left her feeling discomforted and twitchy. She had never found a man to look back at with desire. She’d never experienced the urge. 

The lack didn’t bother her overmuch, not even when she’d been younger, before she’d joined the border patrols when the other girls used to giggle over boys. It had all seemed a bother, a waste of energy when they had their lives and their people’s lives to protect. The other guards were not so consumed with the war they didn’t have time to sneak into the woods for a tumble, but she’d always been different. She was different in so many other ways the lack of any desire to find a partner, even for a night, did not disturb her.

Avranc’s mouth on hers was odd. His beard was rough against her cheeks and chin, and his lips pressing against hers were chapped but pleasantly cool (she was often warm, as if she burned with a constant low-grade fever). It was not an altogether unpleasant experience, kissing someone, but nothing to get giggly over.

His tongue nudged against her lips, and she’d seen enough kisses to know what he wanted. She considered. She was curious what all the fuss was about, and he’d be the best choice to discover it with. He would be gone in a few days at most, and there would be no opportunity for the strife and misunderstands that seemed to run riot when sex was involved.

But she hated the boy in her memories, so she sunk her teeth into his lip.

He hissed, pulling away. “Fuck, Thóriel.” He swiped at his bleeding lip.

“You do not actually imagine I have forgotten who you are, do you Avranc?” She gave him a shove, and he fell back enough for her to wiggle out from under him.

When she was free and kneeling again in the leaves, she looked back at him, ready with a defiant glare. He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were lowered to the ground and his shoulders slumped. “I know what I was.” He drew the back of his hand over his mouth, coming away with a smear of blood. “I humiliated everyone weaker than me. I was cruel, and I _enjoyed it_.” His mouth firmed, eyes flashing up. “But don’t ask me to regret killing Manthor, because I _don’t._ It is his fault Hardang is dead.”

Thóriel sat back on her heels. “You will have a difficult time of it in the city if you go sprouting such ideas. Meleth is not only still alive, she is our Halad. She is too weak to stand from her bed now, but she has the people’s respect and ears. And while Brin is little more than her grandmother’s helping hands and no leader of a people at war, she is Manthor’s niece. And the Haladin love her as the last hope of Haleth’s line.”

Avranc pressed his hand through the air. “I am no simpleton. I know to hold my tongue. I have had plenty of practice over the years.” His mouth twisted with memory.

“We will see.” She stood and brushed the dirt and clinging leaves from her clothing. 

He was watching her, she could feel his gaze. She adjusted the knife at her belt. Even in the heat of the fight she’d not thought of drawing in on him. She wasn’t sure what that said about her. She met his eyes, not cringing from the open desire in them. It stirred nothing in her, only a lingering curiosity. 

“It is easy to regret when it is only words.” He didn’t flinch from her words.

“Sometimes, but sometimes it is the admittance of wrong that is the hardest, for it is the first step away from pride.” He rose and took one step closer to her. “And yet, in the end, they are only words. I can regret who I once was, but not undo a moment of the past.” Another step. 

“There comes a point when the regret serves no further purpose. Regret can only carry one so far, after that point only forgiveness can bridge the last divide.”

“Do I have it? Do I have your forgiveness, Thóriel?” 

She paused in her answer, searching for the truth. Did she forgive him? This boy she’d despised for his actions, envied for his skill and effortless acceptance? Looking into his face now she found she could set aside the condemnation, cut it free and watch it fall away. It had only taken the words of humility from his mouth, hearing the regret in his voice, for the image of the young, vicious youth to wither, and in its place stand that of the man. “Yes.” 

His eyes closed and his breast rose with a breath, swelling full and deep as if he had not breathed in a year. Her opinion of him should not matter so much to him. Yes, he had bullied her at times in their youth, but her opinion of him had been formed from watching him hurt others. 

He should try to make amends to his more frequent victims when he reached the city (if he was permitted freedom of movement). She pulled up the faces of his victims. Most were either dead or had long moved beyond the memory of a childhood bully. He’d been nothing to her for years either, until he’d crashed back into her life and stirred up the past.

A shuffling of leaves snapped her head around. Her eyes darted over the clumping tree trunks, seeking into the bushes as her hand curled around the knife on her belt. 

Avranc slipped a hand about her forearm, leaning close, “Be still. Eludor does not trust. He has come to see what we were up too.” Avranc released her and began walking towards the camp. He called into the trees’ shadows, “Finished eating? You can have seconds if you like.”

A head poked out from its shelter behind a tree’s trunk. Eludor watched Avranc approach, face unsmiling, and eyes as suspicious as ever as they darted between Thóriel and Avranc. But when Avranc drew abreast of the boy, Eludor slipped from the tree’s shadow and came to walk beside Avranc –just out of arm’s reach. It was probably the most acceptance Avranc, or anyone, should expect from the boy. Maybe in time he could learn to trust another human being beside his twin again.

*

She didn’t know what she’d been thinking. No, that wasn’t true. She’d been thinking Avranc had endured enough at the Folkmoot, he didn’t need the added humiliation of bedding down in the barn. There was nothing about the Haladin’s reception of Avranc that had been unjust, but there had been nothing merciful about it either. 

He’d murdered a man. A man still remembered with love and respect. That he had found no welcome was no surprise. She did not doubt her own forgiveness of him. She had made up her mind about him, and would not be swayed.

The Folkmoot came to the agreement that Avranc’s status as Outcast was not to be lifted. They had been ready to escort him to the border. He was still here, helping her make up the bed in Túrin and Níniel’s old room, because the twins had reacted violently to the news of his leaving them. Abandoning them to strangers. The Haladin were not heartless, and would not see children suffer while they could prevent it, even if that meant tolerating Avranc in their community until the twins were adjusted enough to be parted from him.

Thóriel shook out the bed sheet. It snapped in the air and flooded the room in the fragrance of dust. “This will have to do for tonight. I will do a washing tomorrow.” She tossed him the opposite side of the sheet. He caught it and began tucking it into the corners of the double bed. 

“I will do it. I am sure you are busy. I do not need to fall deeper into your debt.” He’d accepted her offer of lodging for him and the twins with a tight mouth and stiff spine. It had hurt his pride to be reduced to begging a bed, but he’d swallowed it. She could respect both the pride and the strength to overcome it.

Thóriel didn’t insist on doing the washing. It was hardly a chore she was scampering to do, and he was correct in his assessment of her demanding duties. Meleth may lead the people with Brin and her mother assisting the aging matriarch, but Brin was only 14, and her mother, though a woman of stout heart, was not of Haleth’s blood and was no warrior. Thóriel was the one the border patrols looked to first, and that was a heavy weight of responsibility. She had to prove every day to her elders, unaccustomed to taking commands or council from a woman of 20 years, that she had the wisdom to order the defense of their people.

She tossed the last feather pillow at him which he deftly caught, and slapped some of the staleness out of it before settling it beside its twin on the bed. “Where did you leave the twins?”

He tucked the quilt over the pillows, “In the Hearth Room. I took them down to the stream to wash. They should be ready for bed. Will you fetch them?”

Thóriel hesitated. “I think it would be better if it were you.”

Avranc sat down on the bed. “I will wait here. They will have to grow accustomed to others eventually. You go.”

Thóriel decided not to start a fight over it and slipped into the dimly-lit hall. The house boasted only two bedrooms. Hers, and the long disused one she’d let the dust and cobwebs claim. She hadn’t been able to stand going in there with it so empty of life.

She found Elumir standing in the open doorway. The boy had pulled on the nightshirt Thóriel had provided –one of her old ones from when she’d been a child—and stood in the moonlight. The fabric was originally white, but looked like it had been rewoven out of pearly thread with the boy inside it. He stood with his arms spread, skin glowing with its own pale light. 

Elumir turned his head to watch her approach, and though Thóriel could have sworn those eyes had been dark before, now they were streaked with the silver of the moon’s rising. Elumir’s hair hung loose about his shoulders, and it too was silver as fish scales. With the child’s wide, willow leaf eyes and distinctive irises and hair, he looked like some fairy child of the Haladin’s legends from the time before their Journey of First Hope. 

“Hello Eagle-lady.” Elumir smiled like his mouth had stolen all the starlight’s splendor. He stepped free of the doorway, walking with feet bare upon the grass. His fingers played in the shaft of moonlight that had snuck through the tree’s foliage as if to personally greet him. 

“Mother Moon favors you,” Thóriel found herself reciting words she’d heard from other women’s lips a hundred times, but had never felt as genuine as when bestowed upon this child, a Moon-child in truth.

Elumir cocked his head back at her. “Mother Moon? I have never heard of her. I was listening to Tilion.”

Thóriel walked out into the moonlight, though she looked entirely normal under its touch. “Who is Tilion?”

Elumir laughed, spinning around in the light. “He is the Star-Rider.” He pointed up at the moon. “He rides the star-paths across the sky, shinning bright. 

Oh Tilion, Tilion from where have you come?   
To where do you go?   
Shine bright, oh Tilion,   
Drive your spears of light into the night.   
Return, Star-Rider, return and save us from the night!” 

Elumir dropped the last note of the song, face transformed into something Ageless and eerily devoid of its pervious childish delight. “Mother sang that to us before bedtime. Eluréd sings it to me now, but I don’t think he remembers all the words right. It used to be longer. Do you know Tilion’s song?” He swung silver eyes on her, renewed of their merry dazzle. 

“No. I have never heard it.” Thóriel had never been what one could call religious, but Elumir’s disavowal of Mother Moon’s existence struck a harsh, vibrating cord within her. Out of sync, and ugly in its plucking.

The Moon and Sun belonged to _them_ , the Second Born. Didn’t the Elves have enough with their own so-called-gods in the West? Must they lay claim to the Haladin’s as well? It was not Elf-women who’d been breathed into life with the moon’s rising, but Human-women. It was not Elf-men whose eyes flicked open as they stretched their limbs for the first time when Father Sun followed Mother Moon into the sky; it had been Human-men.

“Come, it is time for bed. Where is your brother?” Thóriel reached out to capture the child’s hand as she did with the child-orphans who followed her around the city, awe in their eyes and a thousand questions on their tongues.

Her fingers never brushed the boy’s skin. A flash like a shooting star shot out of night’s shadows. Eludor was between Thóriel and his brother, hand snapping out to knock Thóriel’s away. Thóriel drew back, just restraining the instinct that had her hand jerking towards the hilt of her dagger.

Eludor wasn’t snarling like an animal this time, but he was solidly between Thóriel and Elumir. Elumir snuck his arms about Eludor’s waist, the crown of his head only coming up to cradle in Eludor’s collarbone. “I am sleepy, Eluréd. Let’s find Avranc.” 

Eludor’s fingers slid down the soft slope of his brother’s arm to link with his brother’s. He stationed himself between Elumir and Thóriel as they returned to the house. Thóriel had to lead the way through the narrow hall to the sleeping rooms because Eludor refused to give her their backs.

Elumir immediately jumped on the bed beside Avranc when they entered the room, and nudged at Avranc’s arm with his head until Avranc lifted it for him to curl himself into the man’s side. Eludor had his arms crossed, making no move to the bed. He was staring at Thóriel with a look of deep distrust that she was beginning to find deeply troubling. She had heard not even one word from the child’s mouth, and his reactions were divorced from his brother’s (even their sizes were dissimilar, yet Dior’s sons had been twins). How different had their experiences in the wild been?

Thóriel excused herself from the room. As she eased the door closed she heard Avranc call Eludor over, and the shuffling of the boy’s feet over the floor. She started the preparations for Avranc’s sleeping arrangements. She fetched a bedroll and loaded her arms with bedding. 

She had a pallet laid out before the hearth’s fire, and the bedroll spread atop it before Avranc joined her. He picked up the heavy quilt. “I hope this is not too much trouble: us staying here.”

She shrugged. “I leave for the border in a few days. I am never in the city long. No one else is using the house, you might as well.”

She crouched next to the fire, picking up a poker and stirring the logs before dropping a few more on. The fields were just beginning to unthaw from winter’s footprint, and the nights still required a strong fire and a thick blanket.

“You are leaving so soon?” 

Her head crocked back to see his face. It was painted golden-almond and black in the firelight. His skin was smooth and taught around his cheekbones where his beard was not shadowing his jaw.

“We are hard pressed. I cannot be away long.” He snorted softly. “You have something you would like to say? Or is it more of that drivel you were sprouting at the Folkmoot?” 

She was still seething at the words of cowardice –of running away—he’d sown into his account to the Folkmoot of finding the twins. He’d turned what was meant to be a council gathered to judge him, into a platform for his agenda. She could have admired his cleverness if his grim report on the condition of the world had not planted doubts in so many eyes, and creased lines of fretting into brows that should have been resolute.

“It is not drivel just because you do not want to hear it. It is the truth. But perhaps, _Warden_ , you know better the situation of the war? Have your duties protecting this miniscule outcrop of forest taken you beyond its borders? You have some great insight us lesser mortals are ignorant of, do you?”

She threw down the poker, spinning on her heels to face him. “It is called not living in a fantasy world where there is hope, _life_ , to be grasped in some Southern ‘haven.’ It is called not being a _coward_. But I suppose you would not know anything about that, would you?”

His smile was sardonic. “We are all untutored babes next to your wisdom, daughter of Turambar.”

“Stop. Just stop. I am sick of you already.” She reached out to shove him in the shoulder, but he knelt solidly in the blankets and did not even sway with the mild blow.

“Good.” His hand snapped up to capture hers. “I have been sick with you for years.” He held her hand, tight, and the sensation was as soothing as his kiss had been. There was something comforting about the intimacy of skin upon skin. 

His breathing was harsh and hot in the space between their mouths. She yanked her hand from his and surged to her feet. He wanted things she felt no desire to give. There was no impulse besides novelty to close the distance between their mouths and turn the comfort of her hand in his into his hands running the length of her body.

She meant to leave him there, but his hands suddenly fastened on her hips. “Thóriel,” he said her name like he was breathing her in. 

He pressed his face into her stomach, and now he breathed her in in full, mouth open, eyes fluttering closed. Her hand landed with instinct on his head, feeling the lightness of his curls slip through her fingers and twirl about their ends as if greeting her, or pulling her closer. His hands began yanking her tunic up her thighs and to her hips. She could have stopped him, she considered it, but his lips mouthing her abdomen through the layer of her tunic were unexpectedly pleasant.

His fingers slid to the lacings of her trousers, tugging at them with the frenzy of a man burning up with fever. It was a little overwhelming, a little comical, a little flattering, and a little arousing. 

He slid her trousers over her hips, tugging them down until they pooled around her ankles. His hands slid back to cup her rear, and then his face pressed between her thighs. Her fingers clenched in his hair and drew a hiss from him, but he didn’t stop. 

His tongue curled and licked and slithered a path deeper between her legs until it prodded her opening, and then it pushed in, breaching her, _inside_ her. Her knees were too happy to do any work, and he lowered her onto the bedding. She kicked at him when he took his tongue away to wrestle her boots and trousers off, but he was soon settling between her thighs again, hands pressing them wider as his tongue went back to work.

She hissed and moaned, arching up into more, more, more, wanting to stuff herself into his mouth. The pleasure was too intense to head the horror of her pride at the way she was begging him, mindlessly, desperately, threateningly (I will kill you if you stop! Don’t you –yes, yes—dare stop!).

She was vaguely aware one of his hands had abandoned its grip on her thigh to disappear down his own body, but it was of no importance next to the way her world had narrowed down to the sensations his tongue was devastating her with. It wasn’t until he pulled his face away (not even her violent pulling at her hair could get it back where it belonged) that she connected the hand’s task with the hardness replacing that wondrous tongue.

His lips were wet and parted. Stickiness curled in the beard of his chin, and with his face hovering over her she could smell herself on him. He kept his face mere inches from hers as he spread her open. The firelight caught in his black eyes, slid over patches of his face, throwing others into shadow. His breathing was hot against her lips, and he did not take his eyes off hers. It was the most intimate thing she’d ever experienced.

When he was all the way inside, his nose dropped the miniscule distance to touch hers, before pressing into her cheek as he took her mouth with closed lips. His mouth pressed hard and musky against hers as he lifted her hips, and sunk back into her. 

He pulled his mouth away, breathing harsh, and she realized she was as well. He tilted his forehead down to rest against hers, his eyes open, hardly blinking. Her hands ran down his back, slipping up his tunic to feel the play of muscles as he rolled his hips into her, faster and faster. 

She wrapped her legs about his waist, keeping her palms pressed into his undulating back with its slithering muscles and dips of bone, and started arching up to meet his thrusts. He kissed her at intervals, but always his brow came back to seal against hers and his eyes to suck hers back into the black.

After, as they lay together, she thought of how unexpectedly pleasurable she’d found the act of sex. It wasn’t the physical delight, that was sweet, but not mind-blanking so. It was the weight of his body, the slide of his skin against hers (cool against her heat). It was his arms rolling her into an embrace afterwards, and his lips dropping kisses into her neck that rested like balm against her heart. She’d found the root of the drive that had sent those couples sneaking off into the woods together: the intimacy of connecting with another human being.


	85. Chapter 70

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 70

Year 509 of the First Age, Forest of Brethil

She ran her fingers over the wool taking form in the loom. It was budding like a flower, shy for now, just the beginning of a masterpiece, but in a few days it would reach the peak of its beauty. 

Her hand dropped. The loom (Níniel’s) hadn’t cradled a work since she’d earned her first border patrol at 16. When she was young, she’d disassembled the loom and set it up in the Weaver’s Circle. Other girls and boys her age still learning their people’s most prized art had joined her in seeking lessons from the Master Weaver. But that was when she had time to be anything beyond a border guard, before the Elf-war when Doriath fell, before the war eclipsed everything else in her life. 

Her eyes burned uncomfortably at the sight of Níniel’s loom wearing the loving touch of use again. There were other signs of habitation in the house. The larder was stocked, a child’s boots were lined up at the door, and little things like a carving knife and drinking mug left out. It was the first time she’d returned from a stint on the borders and felt like she was truly coming _home_. It didn’t matter that the work in Níniel’s loom was Avranc’s, or that many of the signs of life were made by barely-known children. The house felt warm and inviting as it hadn’t since Túrin and Níniel walked its rooms.

A child’s voice floating in from the backyard drew Thóriel to the window. She pressed her hand into the Drughu-made glass, the pads of her fingers yielding for the ridges of a design worked into it. A sun burst in the glass, spreading its rays from corner to corner. Branches of geometric lines and shapes split off in the background, obstructing the sight of the yard but streaking the floorboards with dawn. 

Thóriel peered through the sun’s belly (the only inches of glass affording a decent view). Elumir knelt only a few feet from the window. A bird was crumpled in the grass before him, its wing bent at an unnatural angle. Elumir’s sweet voice rose in song, fingers soothing as the song’s melody as he stroked the sparrow’s breast and eased the broken wing into position for the sling lying ready at his knee.

Thóriel left the window and went to the door. She stepped into the pale light of a rising sun and was hit with the sound of a hundred chirping birds welcoming it. Her purpose was diverted from seeking information from Elumir when she spotted the very man she sought.

Avranc was seated on a hay barrel a little deeper into the yard, with Eludor leaning back on another stack. Both of them had fabric spread over their knees. Eludor’s brow was pinch, the frown on his mouth aimed at the difficult material in one hand and the slippery needle in the other. Avranc instructed the boy in a relaxed voice as Eludor’s cheeks reddened and his brow blackened, looking like he was one more tangled stitched away from tearing the wool to pieces.

“Do no make the stitches so wide, Eludor. Think of it as coaxing a shy butterfly to your thumb. You must have patience. The enjoyment of the undertaking is in the making –slow as the plod is.” Avranc deftly pulled his needle through the tunic bunched up on his knees.

Eludor scowled, readjusting the two pieces of wool he was attempting to stitch together. From the weaving of the wool Thóriel knew the finished work would be a Haladin tunic. The wool Eludor labored over was a base. It had squares woven in strips over the fabric, waiting for a clever needle to come fill them with the pieces of a life. Avranc was creating such a work now, his fingers nimble as they completed the tinny stitching of a child with silver hair. The silver thread had been spun by the Drughu with real silver.

A spotted dog with a mangy coat was curled up at Eludor’s feet. It was the first to sense her approach. Its floppy ears didn’t so much as twitch as it lifted its head at her, revealing the empty socked of its left eye. It whined, tongue lulling out, and looking like it didn’t possess the intelligence of a log. It was a less than majestic piece of dog flesh, more like a flee-bitted stray than a prized watchdog.

Avranc looked up, fingers pausing in their dance. He stared at her a moment before his face lifted in a smile. “Welcome home. About time, too.”

Thóriel drew closer to the perched pair. Eludor abandoned his work to watch her approach. She thought there might be a hint less suspicion in his gaze, but that could be her imagination.

Avranc set the tunic he’d been embroidering onto a spread of cloth laid over the hay’s bed. He settled his boots in the dirt and rose. With his hair pulled back in a lofty puff, he appeared taller than Thóriel. 

He had adopted one of the Haladin’s tunics again. All the squares were blank save only those reserved for the tracing of heritage. In the square for his father was stitched Hardang’s name and the symbol of Haleth’s House, which Hardang had every right by blood to claim. But every square devoted to the deeds of the tunic’s wearer were empty, as if Avranc were reduced to a child again fresh off its mother’s skirts without even the adventure of an apple-smuggling exploit to boast of.

She found her tongue tied in knots, and it took her a moment to detangle it. She jerked her head at the mangy dog. “Adopting more strays I see.”

Avranc laughed. “That one is Elumir’s. He has a habit of attracting the sorriest creatures around.” He nodded at the boy mending the sparrow’s wing. A scrawny cat had emerged to rub its head against Elumir’s side, demanding attention. “He will want to keep the bird as well.” Avranc shook his head, smiling, and bent a glance back at Eludor. “How long do you say until we have a collection of animals invading the house to rival the forest?” 

Eludor’s face twitched. It wasn’t until the glimmer of a smile won out that Thóriel realized he’d been fighting one and not a grimace. He didn’t answer though, just ducked his head and began stabbing at the wool again. Avranc didn’t seem to have expected a verbal answer. Thóriel wondered if Avranc had ever heard the boy speak.

Thóriel gestured to Avranc’s abandoned tunic. It was child-sized. “For the children?”

Avranc’s face didn’t hold a hint of misgiving over clothing the twins in the garb of the Haladin. “Yes. I think it is about time.” Thóriel inclined her head. That was what the children were here for: to find a new home.

Avranc crossed the distance to Thóriel and picked up her hand. She was half-bemused, half-annoyed when he used it to pilot her from the yard and back into the house. When the door shut behind them, he let her hand drop and learned back against the wood of the door. He arched a brow at her. “Three months, Thóriel?”

She shrugged out of her quiver, settling it on a chair. Her fingers went to her waist and began unthreading the buckle of the holster belt. “I told you: they need me.”

“And I suppose the length of your stay had nothing at all to do with an increase in the Enemy’s activities, or the weight of his fist tightening about our throats?” He shoved off the door, stepping closer. 

She gave him her back. “We knew it was only a matter of time.”

His arms slid around her waist, face pressing into her hair. “Do you know how much I want you when you turn that stubborn chin up at me?” One hand wandered from her hips up the plane of her belly, towards her breasts.

She shrugged him off. “Maybe later. I have to give my report to the Halad.”

He pulled her back against his chest, lips descending on her neck. “I want you now. Meleth can wait.” His mouth dragged down her throat to nibble at its base.

Thóriel tugged his hands off, putting the space of an arm between them. “I said not now. If I am not too tired tonight, I would not be opposed. But we will see. I might have some time tomorrow at luncheon.” She hung the yew bow on its hook by the door.

“You would schedule this like a meal?” 

Her shoulders tightened at his tone. “It is rather like a meal though, isn’t it?” She kept her back to him, working on her armguards. “It takes time to prepare, the actual partaking is pleasurable, but the clean up after requires additional effort.” One shoulder rose and fell with an air of triviality. “It is a nice enough activity, but hardly surpasses other enjoyments.”

“That is…”

“What? What is it?” She spun around, mouth scrunched into a bud, and eyes daring him to finish those words, daring him to find her wanting, odd, _unnatural_.

His mouth closed, and he stared back a long moment, gaze working over her face. “Nothing.” He turned away slowly, eyes the last thing to leave her. His steps were considering as he walked away, as if his mind whirled too fast to heed the movement of his feet.

*

Meleth had Thóriel’s complete respect, but Brin’s mother did not. Elgaweth was an inflexible woman, strong of will and convinced she had the right of it every time. Thóriel and Elgaweth’s opinion of what was best for their people often clashed. Elgaweth had lost her husband to Túrin’s determination to save their people (his recklessness, as Elgaweth saw it). She had not forgotten whose daughter Thóriel was, nor the price the Haladin had paid for open-warfare against the Enemy.

What should have been a routine report from the Warden of the Northern Border to the Halad (with Thóriel pressing for a more aggressive approach on the borders with little subtly), became a clash of wills. In the months Thóriel had been away, Meleth’s sight had been taken as Death’s Hunt caught her scent. It wouldn’t be long now. Thóriel feared for the future of their people with Elgaweth the hand upon Brin’s shoulder.

With Meleth blind, the Halad had need of the supporting hands of her daughter-in-law and granddaughter, and Thóriel was forced to give her report in Elgaweth’s presence. She would not lie to her Halad and conceal the precariousness of their position. They were barely holding on, and had to surrender the outer-ring of the Northern border as Orcs and wolves became an alarmingly regular sight in Dimbar. 

Whatever had drawn them close was not a planned assault on the Haladin intent on crushing the last of their resistance though. The Orcs were focused on the mountains in the north, as if searching for something. That hadn’t stopped them from raiding Brethil for sport when they grew bored.

Thóriel had not found the reception she’d been hoping for in her Halad, and certainly not from the shrewd-eyed woman at Meleth’s shoulder. There had been talk of _retreat_. It soon became apparent where these unworthy thoughts had sprung from. Avranc had been busy.

When Thóriel argued against any capitulation, Elgaweth proposed they seek the council of Mother Moon. The women, Thóriel included, wasted an hour communing with Mother Moon. They gathered round in the Circle of Rising, clasped hands, and attempted to sink into the depths of their being, down to the place Mother Moon dwelt in them all. 

Thóriel sought in vain the deep places of herself where others claimed they heard the echo of Mother Moon’s song. She closed her eyes along with the other women as their voices rolled over her in songs and prayers as they were moved. It was only a half-hearted effort on her part. She’d lost any belief of finding such a well in herself.

Thóriel wore the Moon Earrings the same as every other women who’d received her first Moon Blood, and a part of her believed in Mother Moon’s power. The rest of her prized the legend of the first women’s awakening and the rituals honoring Mother Moon as pieces of her heritage, rather than harboring any authentic belief in their power.

To embrace the power of Mother Moon and Father Sun would mean accepting gods’ existed, and their power over her. To do that was to court madness. She could not entertain even a sliver of belief that her destiny did not lay in the palm of her own hand, like clay, ready for her molding. Morgoth was not a god. He was a Power, not something that could control the fate of the world, or pluck the stings of a life, making it dance to his tune like a puppet. 

(She was burning up inside. There was a fever set in her bones. She ran into icy streams, plunging in, submerging herself in their cold escape. If she could purge this fever from her flesh, she could forget the bitter, naked way Húrin’s mouth had spoken of Doom. She could forget her father and aunt’s fate, and that her unborn brother might have received the most merciful of their ends.)

Thóriel slammed the door of her house behind her, fury stroking hot, broad fingers down her spine, winging over her shoulders, and curling about her chest like a slithering viper. She stormed through the house, the rage blistering when she couldn’t find him. She rode the fury out into the yard, and when that was empty as well, searched for her target in the curving lanes until she cornered him in their Circle’s barn.

The children were not with him. The anger shrugged loose of the last reigns, panting with nothing standing between her and its deliverance.

Avranc was in a stall, brushing down one of the plow horses. She followed him in, snapping the stall’s door shut behind her and yanking his eyes up.

“What do you think you have been doing?” She stalked closer. He blinked dumbly at her, the brush hanging stupidly in his hands. “How _dare_ you poison my people with your fear?”

His eyes narrowed. He straightened up, tossing the brush aside to meet her. “You mean how dare I try to save _my_ people? How dare I speak to them of the true state of the world instead of leaving them to bloat their bellies with the artificial-glimmer of a glorious ending?”

She laughed, scornful, face twisting in a sneer as he stepped into her face. “We are not your people. You lost the right to name us such when you murdered Manthor, shot him in the back like a coward.”

“They are more mine than yours, Half-Elf.” His face was pure haughtier, the arch of his cheekbones enhanced by the lift of his brow. 

Her nostrils flared. “I am sure you _think_ you are doing what is best for the Haladin, but the truth is you just want to pretend you do not hate us as much as you do. You want to prove to yourself you are the _better man_ , the savior who swooped in at our time of need and led us on a Journey of Third Hope.” Her eyes hooded, sweeping over the length of his body, ending on his face with a dismissive scoff. “You can lie to yourself and say this is about us, but it is really all about you. It always has been.” 

A breath stuttered out of him and a flash of vulnerability knit his mouth, but it swept away the next moment. His voice, when it struck, was soft as a serpent’s belly sliding over grass. “A savior? No, Thóriel, that was always _your_ fantasy: the shinning hero who rises on clouds of golden light out of the Darkness, rising above the petty things of this world and far, far beyond any god’s Curse. This is not about me at all. It is about you. It is about you still being that terrified child the Orcs dragged out of Nargothrond. It is about your obsession with pulling yourself out of obscurity to stand beside those cursed wretches you call family.”

Her hands collided with his chest, balling in wads of wool. She shook him. “You are nothing. _Nothing_. You do not know anything about me. You are hateful and cruel and a _liar_ —” 

He grabbed her shoulders and punched a kiss into her mouth. 

She bucked against him. They grappled until they sent each other crashing into the hay. She landed on top and stuck him a blow to the head with her fist. 

He groaned, lashes fluttering, eyes struggled to focus. She wrenched his tunic up, fingers sinking into his waistband to loosen the fastenings. She pulled his cock out, his hips jerking up when her hand closed about it. It was already swollen, and fit hot and hard in her palm. 

She climbed off him long enough to tear her boots and trousers off. She hiked up her tunic, and came down to straddle him. He was recovered from the momentary daze of the blow, and his hands came up to dig into her hips. She sunk herself on him, taking all of him in in one plunge, watching his face. 

She was drowning, flailing, helpless against the Doom pressing its heels into her throat. If she could take him with her, not be the lowest one in the water, maybe the air wouldn’t be collapsing in her lungs. If she could make him share her helplessness, maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid.

His mouth slacked, eyes rolling back, fingers tightening to bruising on her skin. But the best was the breathy sound he made when she rolled her hips, keeping him trapped inside. “Thóriel,” he gasped. “Thóriel, _please_.”

She bent over him, braid dropping to drag in the straw. She pressed her mouth against his ear as she lifted off his length, hovering above him with only the tip of him still pressing against her entrance. “Please, what?”

His eyes focused on her face. They were hot as her skin felt against his. She thought for a moment he wouldn’t ask it, but then a little smirk curved his mouth and he did. “Take me, Thóriel.”

It was enough to send her hips falling onto his again. She took him in, felt him fill her, watched his pupils dilate impossibly wide, and listened to his mouth issue those heady sounds of defenselessness under her. Then he surged up, his hands slipping down her thighs, knees spreading as he heaved up to them, keeping her hooked about his waist. 

The illusion of power over him, anyone (her life), was shattered. He didn’t slam her into the floor or the stable wall though. He held her up, the muscles of his arms bunching as he fucked up into her. And it seemed, in the apex of the moment, that he had pulled them both out of the water and they flew together, far, far above any god’s Curse.

*

Methel died in her sleep only six days after Thóriel returned from the border. The day after they raised Methel’s burial mound, Elgaweth called a Folkmoot. Brin was not of age, and so could not take up the title of Halad, but the people wanted none but the blood of Haleth to lead them. 

The Folkmoot soon exploded from the appointment of a new Halad into the long simmering question of retreating South. It was the longest Folkmoot in their people’s history, stretching into the night and running into the day after, before a consensus was passed with the majority vote. Thóriel fought hard, with all the passion of her blood, against the retreat. But Brin stood with her mother on the side of seeking the Havens, and the people were swayed by her words of peace. 

Mighty of heart though the Haladin were; they were a people who had no love for war and conflict. The life of peace Brin and Elgaweth spun for them set a yearning for the days of old in their hearts. They would discover the promises had been nothing but comforting lies only after they had surrendered their homes and lands to seek them.

Thóriel ran her palm over the doorpost to the house her father had built for Níniel. Her fingers paused to crouch in the grooves and tarry on the knots. Though she chafed at the Folkmoot’s decision to flee, she would follow her people South. They would need all the fighters they had on their journey through lands long fallen to the Enemy. 

She stepped over the threshold one last time, letting her eyes linger over Níniel’s loom, abandoned in the Hearth Room’s corner, and on the chair Túrin always favored by the fire. She walked into the kitchen and swallowed at the patterns of sunlight playing on the baking block, filtered in through the Drughu glass. She breathed in air that remembered the fresh loaves of bread she’d baked yesterday for the journey. Her hands balled as the smell evoked the feel of Níniel’s fingers slotted over hers, guiding her as she stood upon a step stool and kneaded the dough of her first honey-cake.

Thóriel walked the hall to the sleeping rooms, and pushed open the door to the room she’d always consider Túrin and Níniel’s. The bed was made up from the twins’ use last night. Níniel’s chest still rested under the window. Túrin’s chest was shoved into the corner her father had placed it in, and Thóriel went to it, crouching before it and creaking open the lid.

They had to travel light. Thóriel knew this, but that didn’t make leaving the few garments her father had possessed behind any easier to bear. Túrin had had so few possessions, so few to press her nose against and remember him by. Thóriel had already packed the scribbles of parchment he’d left (though she couldn’t read her father’s words, she still ran her fingers over them as if that would bring him closer). And a spare hair tie had found its way into her pack, carefully folded in cotton. It was invaluable to her for the memory it held of him yanking his growing hair back with it, a scowl on his face. 

Her palm went to the knife she’d tucked into her boot, the one Túrin had first shown her all those years ago in Nargothrond. She had a hazy memory of that day: the smell of stabled beasts, the softness of a lamb’s ear, the glint of light off the blade she imaged was moonlight as Túrin drew it to slit the Orc’s throat, and the brightness of her father’s eyes (like a fire burned behind them, unquenchable, a red beast driving him on).

Thóriel dropped the chest’s lid back into place. She didn’t need to thumb through Níniel’s chest to have her lungs struggling to draw air. Some of Níniel’s old tanning tools and the special needles she’d used to sew furs had been wrapped up like jewels and rested beside Túrin’s belongings in Thóriel’s pack. The otter-fur cloak Níniel had made Thóriel as a child (the envy of all the other children); she’d passed on to Eludor. Such a garment was made to be worn, not collect moths.

Thóriel straightened her knees and turned away. The door shut with finally on her way out. She would never walk this close to the memories again.

*

They moved like shadows from one pocket of land to the next, building nothing but the meanest of fires, taking paths that threw up the natural walls of the land to conceal them from enemies’ eyes. They kept the children and the old at their core, and sent patrols circling them, sweeping the land for signs of pursuit, like worker bees guarding their hive.

The distance between the Forest of Brethil and the Mouths of Sirion was vast. It was only a matter of time before they encountered the Enemy. They hugged the edge of Doriath, clinging to the slim protection the trees offered as they pushed south. But Doriath’s most southern border didn’t extend even half the distance they must trek. 

The Haladin skirted the Fens of Sirion, risking the danger of the flat, exposed lands on its west rather then get sucked into the marsh land the summer months had turned it into. It was when they were at their most vulnerable that scouts returned with the dreaded news.

Thóriel scraped a hand down her face, flicking off rainwater and splatters of mud. It had been alternating between pouring and drizzling all day. Any hope of even a firefly sized fire to rub her hands over was as sodden as the kindling would be.

Her boots sunk into the mud and came free with a sucking sound. She passed huddled blobs as she trudged through the camp; miserable faces peaked out of hoods. She reached Brin and Elgaweth’s tent and slipped under the flap, attempting to mind the downpour, but unable to prevent a certain measure of water entering with her.

The first thing she noted was Elgaweth’s pinched mouth (but that was nothing new). Brin’s eyes were egg-sized in a face gone pale, and not even the cloak wrapped tight about her shoulders stopped her hands trembling or her chest constricting with a new round of coughing at the cold air’s entrance. 

Elgaweth usually would have scolded Thóriel for not taking more care with her entrance as she struggled to keep up the front of strength as her daughter’s health steadily declined. They just needed to get somewhere stable, somewhere Brin could rest, warm and dry, and recover the strength this journey, and the weight of her people’s hope, had sapped from her.

Elgaweth’s voice did not rise into a shrill octave, for they had grim tidings to discus. Their people’s extinction swung very close now. “Now you have finally decided to join us, Warden,” Elgaweth didn’t leach the bite from her voice, “we can decide what is to be done about this.”

Thóriel tossed Elgaweth a cool look as she left splatters of mud on the tarp behind her and joined the small circle of gathered Haladin. The scout sent by the patrol who had discovered the Orcs was there. Narci had grown from a plain-faced girl into a plain-faced woman, but her man’s hands had served her well on the borders where they wrapped around a war-axe. 

Thóriel nodded at other friendly faces: Fie, who’d risen to the position of the Western Border Warden, and Kor who stood at his elbow as his right-hand.

Elgaweth gestured for Narci, “Let us hear it from the beginning, every detail you can remember, Daughter.”

Narci fiddled with the harness of her axe mounted between her shoulder blades. “It all happened rather suddenly. One minute our patrol was combing the western flank, and then there were Orcs rushing down from the north, like they were running from a forest fire, or…like they caught the scent of their prey.” Her throat worked in a swallow.

Elgaweth’s lips grew so tight the blood leached from them. Brin straightened her slight shoulders under the heavy fur cloak and asked in a voice she fought to keep the waver out of: “How many?”

Narci’s fingers clenched in the leather harness, “Hundreds. I…at least a thousand, maybe more.”

Brin couldn’t hide the look of devastation. A _thousand_. The Haladin only numbered six-hundred, but that was counting children and the old.

Thóriel fisted her hand around the knife in her belt, and stiffened her spine. If this was to be their end then they would meet it with valor. They would fight until the last child was skewered on an Orcish pike. Her voice snapped out, commanding: “Any Wolf-riders or Men with them? Any evidence of a non-Orcish commander? How did their formations appear? Had they lost all reason to their hungers, or do you think their commanders would be able to pull them to heel?”

Narci licked her lips. “We noted none but Orcs, Warden, and no Wolf-riders among them. As for the chaos of their ranks…it is hard to say, but I would predict, with only an Orc commander, that they would not be able to rally a strong defense if the tables were turned and they were put on the defensive.”

This was the best news they could hope for. “You said in your original report the Orc army was a day’s ride west. Do you hold to that?”

“Yes, Warden. I am not sure they have our location pinpointed exact, for you see, they were pressing too far west.”

Thóriel frowned. “Any chance we could slip by them entirely?”

Narci’s brow grew lines. “I cannot say for certainty. It is very unlikely, I should think, but not outside the realm of possibility.” 

“Very well.” Thóriel turned to Elgaweth, “Call in all the patrols. I will gather 250 axes, and we will hit the Orcs from their rear.”

Elgaweth’s eyes flashed. “250! That leaves the Haladin only a skeletal defense! I will not allow it.”

Thóriel’s nostril flared. “Have you not been listening to Narci’s report? Our only chance is the element of surprise. We need to throw these Orcs into chaos, and we can only do that by sowing the confusion of a rear assault in their ranks.

“Thóriel,” Brin gripped her mother’s forearm. “I do not like this. Narci said they might pass right by us—”

“We cannot take that chance!”

“And we can afford drawing them right too us?” Brin was no war leader, but she had shed the shy child.

“We cannot afford to be put on the defensive, protecting our heart and our backs at the same time.” Thóriel shook her head. “No, taking the initiative is the only hope we have. And we do not have time to delay our action with a long debate.” Thóriel swung her gaze to Fie. “Warden, will you commit your men?”

Fie hesitated, looking back at Brin. But Brin was not the Halad. The Haladin had no official leader for one of the most important hours of their existence. “Yes, I will muster my axes.” 

“Good,” Thóriel squeezed his shoulder. “We will see what the Northern Border Warden has to say when he returns with the patrols.” The Haladin had no Eastern Warden, for that boarder had long been joined with Doriath. After the Elven Kingdom’s fall, the new territory to guard had been split between the Northern and Southern defenses.

Thóriel didn’t loiter in the tent for a dispute to heat up. By rights she should not have seized the decision with nothing but her own will and one voice to stand with her, but they didn’t have time to call a Folkmoot. Out on the borders it had always been up to the wisdom of the Wardens how they managed their people’s defense. She was used to making quick decisions under the pressure of limited time. She did not doubt for a moment that she was making the right choice.

The patrols made good time, and before the sun had gone down, Thóriel had recruited the axes she’d asked for, and she was finishing her personal preparations in her tent. It consisted of a tarp staked against the nearest trees that did nothing to ease the bite of the wind, and only performed moderately against the rain sheeting in. The only dry place was the center of the tent; the perimeter was as soggy as the rest of the camp.

She looked up from stuffing a pouch of medical herbs into her holster belt, when Avranc ducked under the low hanging tarp, just right of the gush of water funneling into the belly of the tarp and running like a river to the sea in a venerable man-made waterfall. His hair was dripping coils of a black pure enough to rival the night sky. The cloak he had thrown about his shoulders couldn’t keep the tunic underneath from developing wet spots. But what had her hands pausing was the quiver on his back and the bow in his hand.

He met her stare with an arched brow. “When are we leaving?”

Thóriel shoved the herbs down into the depths of her belt. “You should stay with the camp. They will need a good archer if things go poorly.”

“I am coming with you, Thóriel.” His voice was steady and certain.

Thóriel threw the belt about her waist, fastening it with violence. “Sure about that? I would not have taken you for someone who signed up for a battle. More of the: shoot-them-in-the-back type.”

There was silence from his side of the tent as her fingers finished jerking the belt’s tongue through its buckle. Then he spoke, voice soft, “You do not really believe half the things that come out of your mouth, do you Thóriel?”

Her shoulders stiffened, and her head jerked up to find him watching her. Her lips felt chapped. She licked them. “Why wouldn’t I?”

He took a slow step towards her. “I think you use your tongue to keep people away when your black scowls do not work. I think you are terrified if someone got too close, if someone _loved_ you, they would find themselves receiving the same end every other person who drew too close to your family has. I think you are more terrified of the Curse than you are of anything on this Earth.”

Her mouth betrayed her, trembling, but then she curled her lip, brushing past him. “And I do not think you know me half as well as you like to think you do.” She tossed over her shoulder as she reached the last inches of dryness, “You should stay here where you are wanted.”

“You really do not get this at all, do you?” 

Her step faltered. She couldn’t turn around to see his face. “What is that supposed to mean?”

She heard him draw closer, but she couldn’t keep walking. His fingers slipped under her braid, brushing the first knob of her spine. “It means I am going to be standing right beside you when we break those whoresons’ backs.” His hand slipped about her neck, half-encircling its column.

She shuddered, feeling a stir of desire. She stepped away from the touch. “Do as you like.” She couldn’t turn back when he stood so close. She walked out into the rain. It felt cold and perfect against the burning in her skin (the fever in her soul).


	86. Chapter 71

The Price of Vengeance  
Chapter 71

The Orcs hadn’t been hunting the Haladin at all. Thóriel discovered the Orcs true target as she inched up a hill’s side, Avranc at her elbow, and they looked down on the battle raging below. It was Elves, and not Sindar ones at that. These Elves were like looking into a dusty memory of Nargothrond. 

Their armor dazzled in the weak sunlight. Its gleam enhanced by the rain washing it and making the steel shimmer like vests of diamonds. Their swords were long, their banners snapping with a pride. Their eyes were bright, many brighter than any Sindar’s. 

These were High Elves, Noldor, and Thóriel had no idea where such an army had sprung from. There should have been no Elves like this left so far North, and yet her eyes did not lie.

The Elves were making short work of the Orc army. For where the Orcs numbered over a thousand, the Elves matched that number and then tripled it. Thóriel wasn’t convinced this was the entire force these Elves could bring to the field, for every one of these Elves was a seasoned warrior. The only explanation she had for an Elven army this far North was that it was accompanied by some measure of civilians. Maybe there were still hidden Elven settlements in the North, and this army had been sent to escort them to safety? 

“Well, that takes care of that, and quite nicely too.” Avranc grinned at her. His face was close and luminous, even dripping muddy raindrops like a hysterical woman tears.

Thóriel looked back over the battle winding down. “That takes care of the Orcs, yes.” Her mouth worked in thought. “We should establish contact with the Elves.”

“What?” Avranc shoved himself up to his elbows. “We have no idea who they are or what their intentions are. We’re vulnerable, Thóriel. Let’s just return to camp, thank Father Sun we survived to see another rising, and continue with the plan the _Folkmoot_ agreed on.”

Thóriel shoved herself back down the hill’s side, crawling until she could stand without risking detection. She stood, front a slather of mud. “I’m going.” 

Avranc practically slid to her feet, so violently did he throw himself down the hill. “No.” He hauled himself up, cheek wearing a new mud-kiss. “Think about this for one minute, Thóriel! Think of what we’re risking, and for what?”

“For the guarantee of survival,” She tried to snap her cloak about her, but it only flopped. “If we could travel with such an army, we would make it to the Elf-Havens, and without burying half our people on the way!” 

She turned to march away; he called after her, dogging her steps: “You’re out of your mind if you think I am letting you go down to meet them alone!”

His words settled like warm embers in her chest. She should crush them, but she didn’t. His hand picking up hers, ignoring her protest, made her feel stronger.

Thóriel decided on a party of twenty, with the rest of their force crouching in the hilly terrain, within bow-distance should the negotiations turn sour. The Haladin delegation had no horses to ride proudly to meet the Elves. They were covered in mud, drenched, and carried the stench of their long road. But they held their heads high, and waked with pride out of the cover of the corpse of trees and towards the Elves who were stacking the Orcs’ bodies for burning.

Thóriel received her first moment of doubt not when the closest Elves drew their swords and trained bows on them (that was to be expected), but when they were challenged and she couldn’t understand a word of the dialect. She knew Doriath’s Sindarin, she probably could have even stumbled over a few words from the Sindarin spoken in Nargothrond, but whatever tongue these Elves were shouting at them was as foreign to her as the Noldor’s, perhaps it even was the High-Tongue.

She pulled her people up short, unwilling to risk a miscommunication. She raised her voice and hailed them first in Doriath’s Sindarin, and when that received no reaction, in the tongues of Men. Still the lines of communication were not opened, and the Elves glowered with ever deeper suspicion, their bows drawn, and their bodies poised to action.

Thóriel shared a glance with Avranc. “We should pull back,” he advised, hand twitching to pull his own bow, but knowing that would spell disaster.

“Agreed.” Thóriel turned to call the order to her men just as the first arrow smacked into Narci’s chest, thrusting deep as a plunging sword from the power of the Elven-bow. 

“Fall back!” She yanked an arrow from her own quiver and slotted it. 

Avranc was doing the same. He was the first to get an arrow off (four other Haladin had fallen in the stretch of a few blinks). His aim was true, and he downed an Elven archer. It was one of the few shots the Haladin got off before the ground was littered with their bodies as they ran for the cover of the trees.

To Thóriel’s despair, the forces she had left stationed in the trees flew out to cover the retreat, returning fire with fire. She heard the pounding of hooves behind her and risked a look back. The Elves had mounted up and were coming to ride them down. 

She loosed an arrow at the closest rider; it flew wide, and only took him in the shoulder. Her moment’s pause cost her, and she took an arrow in her own shoulder, thankfully not her draw arm.

Avranc steadied her when she stumbled with the hit. “We’re almost there.” She didn’t know who he was trying to fool: her or himself. These Elves weren’t going to stop because the Haladin gained the tree-line.

They kept running. She saw Fie fall and Kor after when he bent to help his brother up, refusing to acknowledge the fatal arrow stuck in Fie’ back. They were almost there, almost there, the tree-line so close, with a row of Haladin archers kneeling just before it, shooting off rounds and taking too many hits in return.

And then the Elven cavalry caught them. The horses’ hooves trampled bodies, and long swords flashed out to sever heads. The Elven swords ate blood like Morgoth ate souls. 

Thóriel had never been afraid of the Elves in her memories. She’d never viewed the Elven-blood in her veins as something that made her alien. But looking into their blazing eyes, with their inhumanly sharp faces as they mowed down her people with all the mercy an Orc would have shown, she was terrified. 

They weren’t anything like Human. Their strength, their speed, their impassive pale faces with those blistering eyes, were nothing like the Haladin she’d lived most of her life amongst. She had never hated the blood of her mother, never shrunk from it in revulsion, but she hated these Elves. 

She ducked under a blade, and it sliced the air above her head as the momentum of the horse carried its rider passed. Another was upon her, and she deflected this one’s sword with her knife, though it was wretched from her hand by the force of the swipe. 

She heard Avranc cry of warring against the rider coming at her back. She swerved, her world narrowed down to the place between her shoulder blades, the skin of her nape, all tingling for the coming strike. 

Something collided with her head and sent her sprawling into the mud, dazed. Her fingers reached for her skull and felt a gash oozing blood. She lifted her head, but it seemed the effort took all her focus and strength. The line of Haladin archers were dropping, heads rolling, screams ripped from their mouths. The axe-wielders who’d come charging out of the trees were dying just as fast. There were Elves among the bodies littering the ground, but so few next to the piles of Haladin. 

250\. That’s how many of her people she’d lead to the slaughter. Almost half of their entire number.

She struggled to reach her feet, but could barely achieve her hands and knees. Her shoulder screamed at the task she demanded of it. Then Avranc was beside her, hauling her up by her good shoulder. She couldn’t spare the time to lean into his strength; she had to keep fighting until the last of her people fell. 

She staggered away from him, willing the ground to stop swaying and her feet to stop lurching. She only made it three steps before she was thrown to the ground, landing hard on her back. 

The sunlight glinted off steel, a horse screamed, and she couldn’t get to her feet fast enough, could only watch as the rider’s sword cut through the feeble defense Avranc tried to raise in the form of his bow. The bow was sliced in half like so much straw, and the sword continuing its decent across Avranc’s chest, leaving a path of served flesh and bone in its wake.

“Avranc!” She watched him crumple to the ground like a bird with its wings torn off.

For a moment that couldn’t have lasted more than a lazy blink, she felt herself ripped in two. Avranc groaned, choking on blood, but the Haladin were ahead; the last stand of her people standing back-to-back, taking as many Elves as they could down with them. There was yet the flickering glimmer of hope for their escape if she could just gather the strength to run to them.

She turned away, and accepted the reality hammering against her head, trying to knock sense into her thick skull: she was never going to reach them. And Avranc.... She crawled to where Avranc lay in the mud. Blood bubbled out of his mouth, staining his lips. Raindrops poured without pity across his face, sliding down paling cheekbones. 

She looked at the wound on his chest. She could see ribs and organs through his shredded tunic. For some reason the destruction of that tunic he’d labored over with love and skill felt like someone had plunged their hand into her stomach.

“Avranc,” her hips dropped to the ground beside him, head swaying, and vomit threatening the back of her throat.

His eyes fastened on her. They held desperation thick enough to choke. Her fingers wrapped about his chilled hand, pulling them away from their trembling work on his chest where he tried to fix himself. He squeezed her hand. “Th—Th—”

“Shh,” she pressed her finger to his lips, her face hovering close. “I know. You see, you see—” It was so hard to breathe, so hard to see. “I get it now. I get it.” She raised his hand and pressed it against the mound over her heart.

It wasn’t rainwater leaking from his eyes. His face trembled violently, his breathing growing stuttered. She didn’t beg him to stay with her. He would have if he could. She touched her forehead to his, looking into his eyes, not letting them go until they stopped blinking. 

“Goodbye.” She kissed his mouth. It no longer trembled.

She kept her skin pressed to his skin until shouting, alternating between the Elves’ foreign tongue and the common speech of Men, pulled her head up. She kept her fingers wound in Avranc’s hair where they’d crept up to cradle his face, and cast her gaze about the field, trying to stop the sickness from rising again and the faintness to stop threatening.

An Elf –no—a Man, sprinted across the distance between the Orc bodies and Haladin. The Elves had halted their slaughter at his shouting. The Haladin weren’t about to fall for a trick. There were maybe 60 still standing on the edge of the trees, bodies pressed into a defensive circle with the last archers in the center to down as many Elven horsemen as they could.

The Haladin seized the chance the Man’s shouting provided, and made a desperate sprint for the trees. Some of the Elves made to pursue them, but the Man shouted at them again, leaping over dead bodies as he closed the distance to the knots of Elven cavalry. 

The Haladin disappeared into the trees, and Thóriel prayed, with all the violence in her soul to Mother Moon, that they made it out alive and weren’t foolish enough to lead the Elves straight back to the Haladin camp.

The Man had reached the Elves, but though he was close enough to use a normal voice, he was still shouting at them in their tongue. His face was flushed, his hands gesticulating aggressively at the field of slaughter. Thóriel tried to keep her focus on him; fearful the Elves would swing their mounts any moment back into the pursuit and hunt the Haladin down. But her head felt like a watering hole a herd of horses had just plowed through. Everything was swaying and crashing about in there, and her eyes refused to obey her commands to stay open.

She needed to rest a moment, just a moment. Her head sunk down on Avranc’s breast, ear pressed over his heart. She pretended for the last moments, before blackness took her, that she could still hear the thump-thump-thump of its beat.

Thóriel awoke. She wasn’t home. It was the smell that alerted her. Home smelt like leather and bread and that slightly aging smell because she still covered her bed with a quilt Níniel had patched together of fur pelts. This tent smelt sweet, not like flowers, but the fruity smell of wine.

She eyes slit in the lamp light, but it was a gentle greeting into the waking world next to a blast of sunlight. It was when she tried to sit up, and the injury to her shoulder made itself know, that she remembered. She could have taken another arrow to the chest and it wouldn’t have hurt her like the memories did.

“Lie back down,” the voice carried a Northern accent, Dor-lómin she guessed.

She turned her head to find the Man who’d put the Elves on the leash of his voice seated at her bedside. There was a half-empty bottle of wine beside him, no glass. From the slightly unfocused way he watched her, she’d estimate he’d drunk all that himself.

He had the golden hair of the Hadorians, but not their pale skin. There was a golden undertone to it which was too jewel-like to be the result of many hours under the sun. He might have some Haladin blood. She couldn’t find it in her to care.

“Who are you?” She tried to snap, but the exhaustion sucked up all the thorns.

A laugh startled out of the man. It didn’t tangle with happiness. “You wouldn’t know me, would you?” He leaned closer. She didn’t like how his hand came to rest on the mattress beside her. “Do you know, I haven’t seen another Human in fourteen years? Funny, isn’t it, that I finally see one again and it’s their dead bodies?” He laughed again, and she could smell the alcohol on his breath. “Oh, but I’m forgetting myself. You asked me who I was.” 

He stood, only stumbling a little, and gave her a bow that could have been given to a king, and stank of mockery. Not of her, but of the act itself, and maybe the actor. Was she supposed to feel sorry he’d made himself a mess? “Tuor son of Huor.” 

He plopped back into his chair and grabbed the wine. He tipped the bottle and took a large gulp. “And you,” he smacked the bottle down, “are a Haladin. All of you are –were. My grandmother was a Haladin.”

 _I know. She was my great-grandmother._ Thóriel felt no desire to voice the kinship. So this was her father’s cousin. She couldn’t say she was impressed.

“My people?” She watched him take another drink. 

“I don’t know where they went after they…escaped us. I made sure they weren’t pursued.” He looked away. There were dark circles under his eyes, deep enough she knew they didn’t get there from just a few nights sleeplessness.

She did not trust him. But he had stopped the Elves from killing the last of the Haladin, so many he really did regret what happened. 

She didn’t demand to know what the Elves had been thinking to open-fire. It was obvious. The Haladin had been mistaken for Men of the Darkness, and dealt with accordingly.

“The Elves are nothing if not good at killing their enemies –or what they perceived are their enemies. But so are plenty of Men I’ve met.” He leaned too close again. His eyes ran over her face. “I think –I believe—the Edain are different from such Men. But I can’t remember meeting any others, any but the Easterlings’ slaves.” He reached out and picked up a piece of her hair, rubbing it between his fingers. “Do you think they are? Or are they all the same? All potential monsters given the right set of circumstances?” 

She pushed herself deeper into the pillows, away from the eerie light in his eyes. As if pulled from a trance, he dropped his touch and sat back. His hand reached for the bottle, but paused half-way there before aborting to press against his temples. He massaged them, and let out a sigh. “I’m frightening you, aren’t I?” He laughed, shaking his head.

Thóriel’s spine straightened at the accusation of a drunk turning her blood to milk. “Hardly.” His hand dropped and his head snapped up. “Well, Tuor son of Huor, what is to be done with me? Am I your _personal_ prisoner?”

Tuor frowned. “No. I don’t keep sl—you’re free to go when you’re healed.”

“Is that so? And what will the Elves say about that? I assume this is the Elven camp I’ve been brought to. Will they just let me go free? Are your dogs so well whipped as that?” She arched a brow.

“My—” He snorted a laugh. “Turgon’s face when I tell him—” The laugher died an abrupt death. “Yes, you’re free to go.”

Thóriel pulled the coverlet back, taking care with her shoulder. “If that is so, then I’ll be on my way.”

“You can’t leave yet,” Tuor’s hands came up to her shoulders, keeping pressure off the wound, but definitely trying to push her bodily back into the bed.

She snarled at him, slapping his hands way. “Get off me!”

He drew back, again with a look of surprise. “You’ve been unconscious for three days—”

“What?” She swung her legs over the side of the bed, biting back a grimace. She would not show weakness. “What of—” She swallowed; she couldn’t let her voice break. “What of the dead? What have you done with them?”

“We burned all the bodies.”

Her breath tuned to ice in her lungs, and then fire. “You _burned_ my people’s bodies like Orc filth?”

His hands came up, pumping the air like one would try to sooth a wild horse. “No. A pyre was built, just as the Elves who fell were given a pyre. It was done with respect.”

Her lip curled. Respect? She very much doubted that. There had been dead Elves as well, and they were not likely to treat the killers with honor.

She swallowed back the fresh wound of having not even a tomb to visit, no burial mound to pay her last respects to. Her people…Avranc, were nothing more than ashes upon the Earth now. She didn’t think she could hate these Elves more, but she found she was wrong. The defilement of the Haladin’s bodies was a crime equal to their murders.

She gained her feet, trying to keep her steadying hand on the bedside table discreet. “I am leaving now.”

He studied her for a long moment. Then he bowed his head, and stepped out of her path to the tent flap. “As you wish. I said you were no prisoner, and I hold to that. I would advise you to stay a few days longer and regain your strength, but I don’t think I would have chosen differently in your place.” He watched her take the first stiff steps to the tent entrance. “Wait a few moments and I will have provisions made up for you.”

“My bow?” She demanded.

“All your things are there,” he pointed to a corner of the tent.

“Very well, be quick and I will wait for the supplies.” She crossed her arms.

He let out a gush of air, half-laugh, half-huff. “As the lady wishes,” he bowed, and this time it was definitely mocking, but not cruel. 

She didn’t let herself sag back into the bed until he’d left, and she didn’t let the grief overtake her until she’d walked well-passed sight of the Elven camp. She’d already known there were worse things than death; she’d learned that as a child. But she hadn’t known until Avranc died that the list of those worse things wasn’t limited to torture and enslavement. The realization that you’d been loved too late was another. The knowledge that she’d spoiled it, that Avranc was dead because he had the misfortune to love her, curled in her belly like sour milk and brought her to her knees to heave up her guts.

*

She found the Haladin camp deserted, which was no surprise. It was only wise to put distance between themselves and the Elves. It had taken her three days after leaving the Elven camp to reach the place she’d mustered the force to fight the Orcs. Her shoulder slowed her down, and she still suffered the effect of the sword swipe to the head; but if she was honest, she would admit a part of her no longer cared about finding the Haladin again. 

The fever in her soul had ignited into a flame, and her skin was too hot to the touch. If she could look into her own eyes, they would burn bright as an uncloaked lamp. They would bear witness to a Doom that had found her, and a Curse circling her like a pack of vultures. 

She was resting against the trunk of a tree, tearing at the staling bread she’d rationed, when she heard guttural voices and the inelegant clomp of thick feet against the ground. Orcs. Not the first pack she’d had to dodge the last few days, but they were close, and by the sound of it, would pass very close to her position. The problem with Orcs was that they were like dogs: they caught your scent.

Thóriel hauled herself off the ground and rolled her shoulder, trying to ease some of the stiffness out of it. It was a good way from healed, but it wouldn’t fail her in a fight. She started off south at a lope, weaving through the thicket of trees she’d taken shelter in. These lands were dotted with the bald heads of hills, and stretches of open grasslands with only a few outcroppings of rocks and the occasion stand of trees to shelter behind.

She knew her luck had run out when the gleeful shout rang loud as a Dragon’s roar in these empty lands. They’d caught her scent. They wouldn’t stop pursing her until they’d flushed her out. They were rather like Death in that regard: dogged on the hunt. It wouldn’t be long now before she joined Túrin, Níniel, and Avranc.

*

Thóriel stumbled to a halt before the stone door, almost blind, not from tears or any external pain, but the narrowing of her world, the revelation that consumed her: she had been a puppet hanging from Morgoth’s strings all her life.

She could hear his laughter in her head. She’d stood before him in a room they called the Chamber of Eternal Night; a name had never been more aptly given. It wasn’t just the lack of any light but the defiant blaze of the two jewels upon his brow. The darkness wasn’t like the blackness of night. It was thicker than any cloud, more poisonous than any fume. It was a blackness that corroded the soul. It crawled into her mind, suffocated her with its boiling touch. 

Morgoth’s eyes were points of black inside the darkness, somehow darker and brighter than all the rest. They were dead and alive, the most beautiful and terrible things she’d ever beheld. Her knees threatened to fall out, come crashing down before him, awed and petrified with terror. She locked them into place, refusing, _refusing_ , to bow to this monster.

She couldn’t stop herself from weeping when he turned his eyes on her. Horror, hate, agony, reverence. She thought she would erupt with the intensity of the emotions rocketing through her. 

She’d seen the terrifying glory of the mountains of fire as the Orcs drove her through Angband’s gates and into the fiery-mountains’ bellies. They possessed a bone-twisting power, and until she’d been thrust into the Chamber of Eternal Night, not even the memory of Glaurung birthed such a conflict of wonder and fear in her.

But Thóriel had not surrendered to the reverence. She clung to the hate, nursing it with a thousand wrongs. She stood before Morgoth, met the Dark Vala’s eyes, and held her held high like Neithan who had eaten terror as a child because of this monster, and Thóriel who had lived her whole life in the shadow of his malice.

She was going to prove herself, once and for all, Túrin Turambar’s daughter. She would not break. But Morgoth had not touched her. His brushing against her mind had been little more than the momentary pain of a thumb pressed into hot iron. And then he started laughing. Laughing and laughing like he’d never known a joke so humorous.

He stopped only to rest his chin in his massive burnt hand, black eyes still tickled. When he spoke it was like rocks grinding together, like stars colliding, like planets reordering themselves around his pull. “Well, well, well, it seems Túrin was _quite_ busy. What to do with you, hmm?” He smiled. His teeth were black and yet somehow still gleamed with the luster of pearls in the light of the Silmarils. 

“But I do not need do anything, do I? You will take care of it all for me, just like Túrin and Húrin did, and what nice work they did for me! I reaped a fatter harvest from their flailing acts of ‘defiance’ then from any other get of Men, even Ulfang.”

Her face felt numb. Standing there before Morgoth’s throne, listening to him decide to release her (“To those pathetic Havens with you, by all means. It should be entertaining if nothing else.”), she finally understood the sum of her life. 

She had been a fly caught in his web. All her desperate deeds of defiance, struggling against Doom, refusing to admit her own powerlessness, was just the fly’s panic growing and growing and growing as it sensed the spider’s approach but could not free itself from the sticky trap. 

She had been Morgoth’s instrument, his ‘little amusement,’ from the beginning.

Thóriel pressed her palm against the cool surface of the stone door, her eyes lifting to read the inscription carved into the lintel of the burial mound’s entrance. _Herein lay the defiers of Morgoth, Doom of Men._

When she’d been _let go_ from Angband, she’d felt the press of Morgoth’s eyes burned into her soul. It had been a struggle discovering her will again, but with each step taking her south, further from those eyes, it became easier. His arm was long, and she still felt his will battling against hers, urging her south, south, south, but she was Thóriel daughter of Túrin Turambar. Puppet though she’d been on his strings, even puppets could shuffle their own feet if they possessed enough mettle.

Two paths lay before her now, split like a snake’s tongue. She could go on (not south, somewhere far away and alone) to go on battling the Doom until Death found her. Or she could seize her own destiny and walk out to meet Death, choosing her own end with the sure knowledge that she had destroyed no more lives by her mere proximity.

It was easy, really, making the choice. In a way there had only ever been one road. She’d been running from this fork since the moment they brought her father’s body home and she learned how he died.

Avranc had seen her more clearly than she’d seen herself that last night she’d allowed herself to fall into his arms. They’d been on the march for over two weeks, and had left the familiarity of Brethil behind for the denser woodlands of Doriath. Thóriel was on her back, sweat still clinging to her body from the vigor of their coupling. 

Avranc lay on his side beside her, hands tracing nonsense into the skin of her belly. He’d done this with words once. He’d had a rude learning experience, and never painted letters into her skin again.

Thóriel tolerated the touch, though she would have preferred the uncomplicated comfort of holding hands. His fingers on her bare skin often aroused him, but she’d learned her passions once spent, were slow to rekindle. They did not drive her like his did, and though he never spoke of it, he would become frustrated when he could not stir a matching fire in her.

She tucked her arm under her head, stretching the plane of her belly, and watched the clouds drift across the sky through the lace of the foliage. He spread his palm out over her stomach, stretching his fingers until they almost encompassed the whole of her. She tilted her head down at him, and found him watching her face. 

His hand on her like that felt like a claim, an ownership (or maybe something more complicated than possession). She brushed him off, “Stop it.” She sat up, reaching for her tunic.

He was silent as she pulled the cloth over her head and stepped into her trousers. It wasn’t until she tugged on her boots that he spoke. “Your mother named you wrong. You shouldn’t have been eagle-daughter, but wind-daughter.”

Thóriel scraped the loose hair back from her brow, twisting it into an impatient knot. “What are you on about?” She didn’t turn around, just reached for the other boot.

Again a pause before answering. Avranc wasn’t like other men she’d meant. He pondered things, turned them over in his head for hours, days. Plotting she supposed. He was terribly clever, and had managed to slither his way back into the council of more than one Haladin. It had, after all, been his finely-smithed words that brought them on this journey in the first place.

“You are always running.” Thóriel’s fingers froze on the laces of her boot. “You flee from something you don’t need to fear, Thóriel.” His hands cupped the balls of her shoulders.

She’d done the exact thing he’d verbalized that day. She’d swept his hands off her body, stood, and run away from him and his words.

Now, shouldering the stone door of the burial mound open, she knew he’d been right. She’d kept on running until she’d outrun him and his love. She’d outlived everyone who’d ever loved her, fleet of foot as she was. She’d lived longer than she could bear.

The stone gave way grudgingly, groaning and scraping with every inch. She only needed to ease it far enough to slip within. By the time she’d gained the necessary inches, her muscles were straining with the effort. 

Darkness lay behind the door. The smell of cold stone, the roots of green things, and the barest lingering hint of the herbs the Haladin had burned though the day and a night of the Remembrance.

Thóriel bent to pick up the torch she’d dropped on the grass, and stepped into the darkness. She didn’t plan on coming out again, so she shut the door behind her. As the living world was sealed away, all the hurricanes in her head, belly, and heart stilled. The oceans inside her laid still as a sea turned to glass. There was not even a ripple of doubt within her.

The torchlight illumined the rectangular room of stone, hollowed out of the hill by the Haladin, the stone blocks under her feet set by the skilled hands of the Drughu. She walked to the first tomb. It lay in a boxed alcove. The tomb itself was a plain rectangle of grey stone. She rested her hand over the slab sealed over the body beneath. It was cool against her skin’s fire.

The only decoration was an engraving over the place the head lay. 

_Finduilas Faelivrin  
Beloved of Gwindor_

Túrin had chosen the words. Thóriel remembered him taking her hand the night of the Remembrance, and pressing her fingers into the engraving’s edges and curves, tracing out her mother’s name. She could feel his steady legs against her back as she leaned into him, seeking the comfort of the one familiar face left in the world. His hand guiding hers had been hot, but safe and strong. The pillar of rock she clung to in a storm of darkness.

Thóriel bent and pressed a kiss into her mother’s name, the chill meeting her lips no colder than kissing a dead lover. She moved on. Níniel’s tomb was next, but though Níniel’s memory had received all the same Remembrance as Túrin and Finduilas, there was no body resting in the stone.

Thóriel touched the letters carved into the slabs’ head. The words were in the Cirth of Doriath, carried over from the inscription Túrin had chosen for Finduilas. Thóriel could no more read the letters than she had been able to read her mother’s marking, but she’d memorized the words. It was she who had picked the words the Drughu chiseled into the stone. 

_Nienor Níniel  
She who was loved_

Thóriel dropped a kiss into her second-mother’s name, and walked on to the last of the tombs. 

The slab of her father’s grave bore not only the engraving, but also a sword. It was unusual for a Haladin to be buried with possessions, but Túrin had never been a Haladin. It had felt wrong to think of any other hand wielding Anglachel, the sword Túrin slew Glaurung with, and the one he used to take his own life.

Thóriel only lingered over Túrin’s grave a few moments. She felt her time spiraling down quickly now. She need not press more kisses into stone and drop vain tears upon their tombs, for she would soon be enclosed within their arms.

She had never touched Anglachel, Túrin had never allowed it. There was one time she’d snuck into Túrin and Níniel’s room, and crept over to the mighty sword Túrin had left propped against the wall. Her fingers brushed over the scabbard, awed; but when she tried to lift the sword, she found it too heavy for her skinny arms. It went crashing to the floor. 

She shot the anxious eyes of a child knowing they flirted with trouble at the door, but the sword was so tempting. The blade had slid a few inches out of its scabbard, and the black metal made her think of a wolf’s eyes, gleaming and hungry. Her fingers reached for it, as if in a dream, the only thought left in her head was getting her skin in contact with the blade. 

Her skin never brushed it, because Túrin was there, yanking her fingers away and shaking her so hard her teeth chattered together. 

That was the first and only time she’d been afraid of her father. She never sought out the sword again. Now, looking back, she could see the fear blowing Túrin’s pupils wide as he put his hands on her. She heard his barking voice, and didn’t cower from its harshness, but listened to the words underneath, the panic ridding him.

Thóriel’s hand settled on Anglachel’s hilt. She lifted the sword off her father’s tomb, and laid herself there atop Túrin’s body, resting in the sword’s place. She stretched her legs long, and settled her hips in the middle of the slab. 

With hands careful not to let her skin brush against Anglachel’s bade, she drew her father’s sword. She felt like she awoke a Dragon from a long slumber. Its belly echoed empty and ravenous.

It was an awkward maneuver, but she settled her shoulder blades back into the bed of stone, and balanced the sword above her. She had no choice but to wrap her fingers about the blade, for she could not reach the hilt where it pointed at the ceiling.

With fearless hands she grasped the black metal. A hiss, a voice like the coldness between the stars, the abyss of light, the greed of cracked soil in a land locked in famine, and her answer: _Drink, and return me to the one you stole._

She plunged the sword into her chest, aiming for her heart. It cut her fingers to ribbons on its way down, but drank her blood and life as it did.

She thought it would be over then, finished, but there was more than Second born in her blood. As the life drained from her, she felt something vast, cold, and majestic as the expanse of the universe reaching for her. But the path it painted in Halls of Waiting and a life re-born on their other side was utterly alien to her. 

She turned from it, rejecting. It clawed back, the pull twisted from a siren’s deceptively gentle song into a screech raking over her eardrums, _demanding_ she obey. But another path was open to her, and the claws could not find a hold upon her soul, for it had long been destined for the fate of a Second born. She raced with all the fleetness of foot she’d been running away with into the arms waiting for her.


End file.
